Eleana Kim, UCI anthropology professor, has received the James B. Palais Book Prize for her newest work, Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (Duke University Press). The honor, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies, annually recognizes distinguished scholarly work on Korea by an outstanding scholar of Korean studies from any discipline or country specialization.

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, Kim’s book examines how human and nonhuman ecologies interact and transform in spaces defined by war and militarization. Offering a brief history of the zone’s nearly seventy-year existence, she explores how, amid the context of climate crisis, perpetual wars, and ongoing militarization of the planet, the area can serve as a framework for conceptualizing peace beyond human geopolitics.  

-Check out an author Q&A with Kim here: www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2022/2022-11-16-making-peace-with-nature-

Kim received her Ph.D. in anthropology from NYU in 2007. She was an associate professor in anthropology and the graduate program in visual and cultural studies at the University Rochester before joining the faculty at UC Irvine in 2014. She has received fellowships from the ACLS, SSRC, Fulbright Commission, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the Korea Foundation. Her research interests center around questions of nature and culture and the biological and the social in the production of personhood, social relations, and moral values.