Meet the speakers and chair
Atsuko Ichijo is Associate Professor in Sociology in the Department of Criminology, Politics and Sociology, Kingston University, London. Her research interests are in the field of Nationalism Studies. Her recent publication includes:Nationalism and Subjectivity: East Asian Experiences (2025, forthcoming, Oxford University Press); ‘Defending the Scottishness of Scotch Whisky’ (2024), in Catherin Ng, Titilayo Adebola and Abbe Brown (eds) Place-Branding Experiences: Perspectives from Intellectual Property Owners, Users and Lawyers, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 57-74; ‘What does it mean to be a Christian nationalist in Meiji Japan?: Religion, nationalism and the state’, (2023),International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 309-327; ‘“Overcoming modernity”, overcoming what?: “Modernity” in wartime Japan and its implication’, (2022), International Journal of Social Imaginaries, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 107-128. She is a member of the editorial team of Nations and Nationalism.
Yookyeong Im is an anthropologist specializing in law, language, gender and sexuality, and social movements in the context of contemporary Korea. Her work examines the ways in which the law engages with social discrimination and political aspirations. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, among others. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her doctoral thesis, which explores how legal advocacy has emerged as one of the most potent means in South Korean queer activism since the late 2000s. With ethnographic and historical approaches to the increasing judicialization of social movements, she revisits the question of law’s potential in emancipatory politics and reveals the dilemmatic function of law in shaping queer political imaginations. Before joining the University of Sheffield, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Korean studies, Indiana University Bloomington.
Aram Hur is the Kim Koo Chair in Korean Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She is a scholar of nationalism and democracy in East Asia. Her first book, Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia, is winner of the 2023 Robert A. Dahl Award for "scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy" from the American Political Science Association. Her research appears in leading disciplinary journals including the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Journal of East Asian Studies. I frequently serve as an expert panelist on Korea & democracy issues and contribute evidence-based commentary to current affairs, including in Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, and B.A. with honors from Stanford University.
Elliott Green is Professor in Development Studies in the Department of International Development at the LSE. Elliott has three main research areas: 1) ethnic politics and national identity in Africa, 2) patronage, clientelism and African development, and 3) the political demography of modern Africa. He has conducted fieldwork in Uganda, Tanzania and Botswana, and is currently working on a book manuscript on ethnic and national identity in modern Africa. His major publications include Industrialization and Assimilation: Explaining Ethnic Change in the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2022) as well as articles in such academic journals as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development and World Development, among others. He currently sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Development Studies, Nations and Nationalism and Regional and Federal Studies, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Outside academia he has briefed the British High Commissioner to Uganda twice (in 2008 and 2010) and regularly writes blog entries for a variety of websites. He holds degrees from the LSE (PhD, MSc) and Princeton University (AB).