[Book Talk] A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation

A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2025; cropped)

Prof. Kornel Chang, Rutgers University - Newark

Thursday, April 30, 2026
4:00 PM

Bunche Hall, Rm 10383

When Japanese imperial rule ended in August 1945, the Korean peninsula erupted with hopes and aspirations that had been bottled up for nearly forty years. This electrifying excitement jolted Koreans into action everywhere. Peasants occupied Japanese-owned farmlands, workers seized control of factories, and women demanded political and economic equality. Yet, within months, those aspirations would collide with the realities of a U.S. military occupation, giving way to a bitter contest over the future of Korea that would ultimately end in political tragedy. 

Drawing from his recently published book, A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2025), historian Kornel Chang will discuss how liberation was experienced from the ground up by ordinary Koreans while also showing how U.S. occupation forces reshaped - and often foreclosed - the possibilities that liberation had seem to open. Consumed by fears of instability and communist influence, the military high command, led by Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, clashed with Korean and American reformers who were pushing for democratization and social change. Chang's talk recovers a moment of genuine political possibility - one of competing futures in which different choices may have led to different outcomes. Division and war, he contends, were not inevitable. North and South is not the way it had to be.    

Kornel Chang is Professor of History at Rutgers University - Newark, where his research and writing focus on the history of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, with particular attention to East Asia. He is the author of Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press, 2012), winner of the Association of Asian American Studies History Book Prize and runner-up finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize. His newest book, A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2025), is narrative history of southern Korea in the aftermath of World War II, when the collapse of the Japanese Empire ushered in an extraordinary moment of promise and possibility that ultimately ended in tragedy.  A Fractured Liberation was shortlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize, awarded the Phi Alpha Theta Best Second Book Award, and named one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025.   

Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies