Yeseul Byeon

Yeseul Byeon is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Stanford University, where she specializes in the history of modern Korea, with intersecting research interests in media history and science and technology studies. Her dissertation examines the political life of media and information technologies in South Korea, focusing on their uses in producing and contending with the inter-Korean border. Her work also situates Korea within a comparative framework that identifies shared patterns of technologically-mediated state-building and cultural production across twentieth-century partitions—a subject on which she designed and taught a course at Stanford. Before Stanford, she worked at History Lab (Columbia University) as part of an interdisciplinary team building large-scale digital archival databases and data science tools for research on diplomatic history, international relations, and government declassification. She received her BA from Yale University and her MA from the University of Chicago.