We're pleased to host a talk event by Dr. Yuri Doolan whose new publication illustrates intimate portraits of mix-race orphans after the Korean War captured by Joo Myung Duck, our featured artist.
Dr. Doolan's book "The First Amerasian" offers a fascinating historical background behind Joo's 1960s series of this sensitive and controversial subject back then and now.
Dr. Doolan will tell the 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 US homes during the 1950s and 1960s. His talk will explore the Cold War ideologies undergirding this so-called rescue and show how this process of removal and placement via US refugee and adoption laws profoundly shaped the lives of mixed-race Koreans and their mothers.
Dr. Yuri Doolan is an Assistant Professor of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the inaugural chair of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program at Brandeis University.
