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. He is an award-winning historian whose work explores the anti-Asian racism and structural violence of US militarism and empire.
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 in US-occupied South Korea to adoptive American homes 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 US 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’ 2026 James B. Palais Book Prize for the best book published on Korea in 2023 or 2024 and received an honorable mention for the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s 2025 First Book Award.
Doolan is currently completing a second book project titled America’s Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Reproductive Labor in the Cold War Transpacific. Tracing how systems of US military prostitution developed in postcolonial Korea and circulated across Cold War Asia and the Pacific, it argues that militarized “comfort” labor was central to the reproduction of US empire and to enduring forms of anti-Asian racism and gendered violence in US society and culture.
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 and writing have 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.