Deokhyo Choi

Deokhyo Choi specializes in the history of modern Korea, Japan, and US-East Asia relations. His research interests include empire, colonial memory, human migration, and the global Cold War.

His current research focuses on the dissolution of the Japanese empire and the US occupation of Japan and Korea. He is currently working on a book project, titled The Postcolonial Aporia: The Korean Minority Question and the US Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952. The book explores how the presence of postcolonial Koreans in Japan became the primary locus for defining the end of the imperial unity of “naisen ittai” (“Japan and Korea as one body”) through the enactment of a policy of “ethnic unmixing,” legal debates over postcolonial sovereignty, and the demarcation of new national boundaries between US-occupied Japan and divided Korea. The book also examines how the Korean minority question in occupied Japan became a critical locus of US Cold War interventionism in East Asia.

Choi has published numerous articles and chapters in three languages (English, Japanese, and Korean), including “The Empire Strikes Back from Within: Colonial Liberation and the Korean Minority Question at the Birth of Postwar Japan, 1945–1947” (American Historical Review 126, no. 2, June 2021). The article challenges the historiographical “amnesia of empire” in the study of US-occupied Japan by examining the convergence of two critical social phenomena of decolonization, namely, the repatriation of Japanese colonial settlers from Korea and the liberation of Koreans in Japan. 

Choi is the recipient of more than a dozen research grants/fellowships and awards, including the Leverhulme Research Fellowship, the Academy of Korean Studies Grant, the Pony Chung Fellowship for Young Korean Studies Scholars, and the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Best Dissertation Prize in the Humanities.

Before joining the University of Maryland in 2024, Choi was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He received his PhD in History from Cornell University and his MA in Area Studies from the University of Tokyo. He also taught at the University of Cambridge, Korea University, and Yonsei University.