Scholarship and Biography
Yuri W. Doolan (PhD, Northwestern University, 2019) is Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the inaugural Chair of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies at Brandeis University. His research and teaching focus on Asian American history and the histories of race, gender, and empire in the Pacific world.
Doolan’s first book, The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking story of how Americans created and used the concept of the “Amerasian” to remove thousands of mixed-race children from their Korean mothers to adoptive homes in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. The book explores the Cold War ideologies undergirding this so-called rescue and shows how this process of child removal and placement via U.S. refugee, adoption, and immigration laws profoundly shaped the lives of mixed-race Koreans and their mothers. The First Amerasians won the Association for Asian Studies’ James B. Palais Book Prize for the best book published on Korea in 2023 or 2024, and received honorable mention for both the Association for Asian American Studies’ History Book Award and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s First Book Award.
Doolan is currently completing a second book project titled America’s Comfort Women: Sexual Labor and the Making of U.S. Empire. Drawing on multinational and multilingual archives, the book traces how systems of sexual labor were organized around American bases in occupied Japan and postcolonial Korea, later extending across Cold War Asia and the Pacific through Vietnam War–era R&R circuits. It argues that militarized “comfort” labor functioned as a historically specific form of reproductive labor that helped sustain U.S. military presence in Asia. In doing so, America’s Comfort Women shows how regimes of militarized intimacy were not marginal to American power but foundational to the U.S. military empire.
Doolan’s shorter work appears in venues including Critical Ethnic Studies, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Diplomatic History, and The Journal of American Ethnic History, as well as in edited volumes and public-facing projects in the United States, South Korea, and Germany. His research has been supported by a number of prestigious awards and grants from institutions including the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, the Korea Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, among others.