Andre Schmid

Professor Schmid's research and teaching focus on 19^th and 20^th century Korea and East Asia, as seen in the broader context of global, comparative history. He is interested in historiography and the uses of public memory, the relation between cultural practices and political economy, gendered social history and popular social movements. He has just finished a a book about the early formation of North Korea after the devastation of the late colonial and Korean wars. Entitled North Korea's Mundane Revolution, the book focuses on the turn to the heteronormative nuclear family by both the population and the Party-state as a primary site for postwar reconstruction and decolonization. In this gendered, socio-economic history of north Korean urban families, he examines how issues such as advice literature, apartment construction, divorce, and consumption established norms that while explicitly revolutionary often enabled, implicitly, a conservative politics that has always remained at the core of North Korean political culture.

His book, Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 (Columbia University Press, 2002), received the John Whitney Hall Award of the Association of Asian Studies.He has published in various journals including the Journal of Asian Studies, American Historical Review, Yoksa Munje, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Journal of Korean Studies, and SAI among others.

He has served two terms as the Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.