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, from the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings through the 1954 Bikini incident and the nuclear tests that followed.
Drawing on multilingual archival fieldwork in both countries and discourse tracing, he develops the concept of mnemonic nuclearity, the discursive coupling and severance of nuclear technology and collective memories of the violence it caused. He argues that this coupling and severance were hierarchical: memories of nuclear violence were politicized and depoliticized through modes that differed in how far the state prevailed over the direction of memory, so that the more the state governed which nuclear violence was remembered, the more legitimate the technology became.
From opposing premises, Japan's universalism and South Korea's particularism drew on the same modes and converged on the foreclosure of Korean nuclear-harmed people. His work thus recasts the legitimation of nuclear order as resting on managing which harm is recognized as nuclear and remembered as violence.
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