Sara Kang (she/hers) is a PhD candidate in the History Department with a secondary field in the studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Starting Fall 2024, Kang will be joining Princeton University's Society of Fellows as a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of History, where she will continue her research and teaching in modern Japanese, Korean, and Asian American history. 

Kang's dissertation considers the national limitations of women's feminist agendas in East Asia that continue to be so painfully entangled in the lingering memories of the Asia-Pacific War. The figure of the "sexually-violated woman" is the focus of her doctoral project, which examines the genealogy of military sex management in Japan, South Korea, and the Asia-Pacific during the two American Wars in Korea and Vietnam. In her dissertation, "Operation Relax: Empires of Sex in Japan, South Korea and the Asia-Pacific," Kang traces the history of the US military program known as Rest and Recuperation (R&R) that built on the vast geographies and infrastructure of the exploitative Japanese "comfort" system. She hopes to expose the enduring colonial legacies of a global patriarchal system founded on the notion that soldiers require the racialized and gendered labor of "rest" and "comfort" to be healthy. She is also interested in the ways in which these wars facilitated transnational feminist bonds in the post-Cold War era and in discovering ways history-writing can help reappraise ethnic divisions between women in the postcolonial world.

Kang's background as a first generation and low-income college student inspires her work and dedication to cultivating academic environments where minority students from disadvantaged backgrounds can thrive. Kang holds an A.M. in Regional-Studies East Asia from Harvard University and a B.A. in History and Japanese from Williams College. She received language training at Waseda University, Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, and Inter-University Center for Korean Language Studies at Sungkyunkwan University. 

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Research interests: modern Japan, modern Korea, transnational feminism, gender-based violence, sex-work, militarism in East Asia, U.S. military