MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Monica Kim has received a major award, being named one of 25 2022 MacArthur Fellows. The award, also known as the “Genius Grant,” includes $800,000 of no-strings-attached grant money.
“I was so shocked,” Kim said.
Often called one of the most coveted awards in academia, the fellowship doesn’t reward past accomplishments but rather those with extraordinary talents and potential to propel their work. Kim spent the last ten years studying American warfare, specifically the Korean War.
“I understood that my parents had emigrated to this country because of the war on the Korean Peninsula, but growing up in the 80s the Korean War was completely absent from our textbooks,” she said.
Most of the history she did learn was about war generals and political elites, not about the people on the ground. So she got firsthand accounts and wrote a renowned book.
“When you go to ordinary people’s experiences, basically your assumptions about war just… explode,” Kim said.
She plans on using the Genius Grant to continue her studies. She spent her career working with people around the globe and plans to create a lab to streamline her research.
“I feel like this kind of money gives me the opportunity to really bring together actually those worlds. Scholars, activists, journalists, so we can all talk and really sustain conversation about a different way of thinking about local geopolitics,” Kim said.
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