Rate My Professor Soyoung Suh

Soyoung Suh is Associate Professor of History and Korea Foundation Professor at Dartmouth College, where she also serves as Associate Professor of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages. She received her B.S. in Chemistry, M.S. in History of Science from Seoul National University, and Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Korean Medicine between the Local and the Universal: 1600–1945,” focused on the History of Korean Medicine as her major field, with a secondary field in History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine. Prior to Dartmouth, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in association with the Department of History of Science (2008–2009), served as Research Fellow at the East Asian Sciences and Traditions in Medicine Research Center, University of Westminster (2009–2010) on a Wellcome Trust-funded project entitled “Treating the Liver: Towards A Transnational History of Medicine in East Asia, 1500-2000,” and was Visiting Assistant Professor at Pitzer College (2007). She joined Dartmouth as Assistant Professor in the Department of History in association with the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Program in 2011, advancing to Associate Professor in 2017 in association with the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program.

Suh's research specializes in the history of medicine in Korea since the fifteenth century, encompassing medicine, language, identity, breast cancer, gendered medical culture, and broader East Asian contexts. Her major publication is the book Naming the Local: Medicine, Language, and Identity in Korea since the Fifteenth Century (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017). Key peer-reviewed articles include “Stories to Be Told: Korean Doctors Between Hwa-byung (Fire-illness) and Depression, 1970–2011” (Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2013), “Shanghanlun in Korea, 1610–1945” (Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity, 2015), “Rethinking Breast Mountain (yuam): Surgical Treatments of Breast Cancer in Korea, 1959–1993” (Asia Pacific Perspectives, 2016), and “From Influence to Confluence: Positioning the History of Pre-Modern Korean Medicine in East Asia” (Korean Journal of Medical History, 2010). She has received honors such as the Kyujanggak Fellowship from Seoul National University (2018), Jacobus Family Fellowship and Provost Research Funds from Dartmouth (2017–2018), Junior Faculty Fellowship from Dartmouth (2014), and fellowships from the Needham Research Institute (2004) and UCLA History Department. Suh teaches courses including Introduction to Korean Culture, Body Parts, Body Wholes: An Introduction to the Comparative History of Medicine, North Korea: Origins and Transition, and Christianity in Korea.