About
Woohyeok Seo is a PhD candidate in International Relations (IR) at LSE, funded by the Kwanjeong Educational Foundation. His doctoral research examines the relationship between discourse of nuclear technology and collective memories of nuclear violence. His broad academic interests span (Critical) Security Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Memory Studies, and Historical IR.
Woohyeok currently serves as the PGR Officer for the BISA Global Nuclear Order (GNO) Working Group (2025–2026). He has held multiple editorial roles at Millennium: Journal of International Studies, serving as Associate Editor (Vol. 54), Editor (Vol. 53), and Deputy Editor (Vol. 52).
Prior to starting his PhD, Woohyeok worked as a political researcher at the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in the United States (2018-2021). He also participated in the Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project in Washington DC (2014-5).
Woohyeok holds a BA in Political Science and International Studies from Yonsei University in Seoul, an MA in International Security (with concentrations in East Asia and Human Rights) from Sciences Po Paris, and an MSc in IR (Research) from LSE.
Research topic
Becoming (Un)Nuclear: Memory, Technology, and the Hierarchy of Nuclear Harm in Japan and South Korea (1945-1975)
Woohyeok's research examines how discourses of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy were co-constituted with collective memories of nuclear violence in postwar Japan and South Korea.
Drawing on multilingual archival fieldwork in both countries and discourse tracing of the documents, he develops the concept of mnemonic nuclearity, the extent and manner in which discourses of nuclear technology and collective memories of nuclear violence constitute each other. He argues that this relation produced a hierarchy of nuclear harm, in which the standing of one memory limited or eliminated that of another. In both countries, universalistic and particularistic approaches to nuclear technology worked together, creating hierarchies according to time, place, nationality, and technology.
These hierarchies shape which nuclear practices can be challenged through remembered harm. In this way, the hierarchy of nuclear harm entailed the legitimation of the nuclear order. His work contributes to nuclear politics, memory studies, and historical approaches to international relations, and to the wider question of how the means of violence, the memory of that violence, and the order legitimated by both are constituted together.
Teaching Experience
IR205 International Security (LSE) 2023/24
Academic supervisor
Research Cluster affiliation
Theory/Area/History Research Cluster
Security and Statecraft Cluster
Expertise
Memory; Nuclear Weapons and Technology; (Critical) Security Studies; Historical IR; Science and Technology Studies; Northeast Asia
Woohyeok has been partially funded by Kwanjeong Educational Foundation.