Kim, Mi Gyung

views updated

Kim, Mi Gyung

PERSONAL:

Born in Busan, Korea. Ethnicity: "Asian." Education: Seoul National University, B.S.; University of Texas at Austin, M.A.; University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8108. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, associate professor, 1996—.

MEMBER:

History of Science Society, Society for French Historical Studies.

WRITINGS:

Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mi Gyung Kim told CA: "My interest in history of science derives from the realization that science has become the most effective and long-lasting means of Western domination and colonization because of its supposedly value-neutral, objective, and rational pursuit of universal truth. Consequently, my projects aim at deconstructing this mythology through historical research. Chemistry has been the subject of choice in part because of my previous training in it. More importantly, it is the most labor-intensive discipline that gave rise to modern laboratory sciences. As such, it debunks the mythology of Western science as a logical enterprise that inevitably came to eclipse the erroneous views of the past.

"My future projects will deal more directly with the role science played in the construction of modern European states and empires. The Aerial Theater: Balloons and the Public in Pre-Revolutionary France will focus on the balloon ascensions that created a mass public for science and thereby a problematic political situation just a few years before the French Revolution. Wilhelm Ostwald, a project I began twenty years ago, configures the rise of science as the alternative cultural authority in modernist Germany. Both projects will probe the relationship between science and modernity."