About 🙋‍♂️

as of December 30, 2025

Yemok Jeon (전예목, 全叡睦)
My Profile@Johns Hopkins
[CV], yjeon6@jhmi.edu

I am a Ph.D. student in the History of Medicine@Johns Hopkins University.

My research interests include

  • Knowledge-making processes that emerge through interactions between elites and local actors
  • The influence of public health discourse, shaped by colonial legacies and historical contingencies, on disease perception and medicalization
  • The relationship between media and public health interventions in postcolonial socialist countries
  • Risk management and the formation of health insurance systems across the transpacific regions in the postwar era

I have been working on the global histories of public health in East Asia and the United States, with a particular focus on health insurance, biological warfare, and international cooperation in public health.

📰News📰

2025

  • 🎃 Oct 31, 2025 I won the Best Graduate Student Group Costume Award for my ginseng costume and the Best Pumpkin Carving Award 🎃 for carving ginseng in Chinese characters at my department’s annual Halloween party!
  • 🎉 Aug 27, 2025 I received the Graduate Student Association (GSA) Student Spotlight Award for designing and teaching the BLAST course Herbs, Acupuncture, and Moxibustion: Living Histories of Medicine in Asia. Enrollment reached 2,357 students worldwide, and a pre-course survey with 650 responses guided the course design.
  • 🎉 May 09, 2025 I was selected as a Hugh Hawkins Research Fellow for the Study of Hopkins History. My project, “Fragile ‘Heroes’ Under Benevolent Control: U.S. Aid, Heroic Narratives, and the Silencing of Korean Student Doctors at Johns Hopkins, 1945–1950s,” explores how Cold War aid programs shaped the experiences and erasures of Korean student doctors within the institution’s global legacy.
  • 🎉 May 02, 2025 I was awarded an MSH-CMHSM Summer Research Fellowship and accepted into the JHU–Fiocruz Summer School in Medicine, Technology, and Environment, held in Rio de Janeiro from July 22 to August 1, 2025.
  • 📅 Apr 24, 2025 I presented my second-year paper titled “Insects on Ice: Disease Uncertainty and Local Knowledge in Germ Warfare Narratives of the Korean War (1950–1953)” at the Spring 2025 Colloquia hosted by the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (Baltimore, MD).
  • 📅 Mar 16, 2025 I first participated in the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), where I served as both 📖 panel organizer and presenter🎤. I presented a paper titled “Patient or Martyr of Imperialism: Uncertainty of Disease and ‘Germ Warfare’ During the Korean War (1950–1953).” (Columbus, OH).

2024

  • 📅 Mar 02, 2024 I presented my part of the dissertation project titled “Going Beyond the ‘Fathers’ of National Health Insurance” at the 4th Korean Studies 🇰🇷 Young Scholars Graduate Student Conference, hosted by James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)

2023

  • 🎉 Aug 28, 2023 Started a Ph.D. in History of Medicine@Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD)

2022

  • 📅 Oct 20, 2022 Gave a Talk at the 11th World Congress of Korean Studies held by the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) (Seongnam-si, South Korea)
  • 🎉 Jun 03, 2022 Published a post on the Wilson Center Blog discussing the historical analysis of issues surrounding the distribution of vaccines to North Korea [Link]
  • 🎉 Apr 30, 2022 Published a paper in the Korean Journal of Medical History about debates on the health insurance system among major political groups of Koreans and the US Military Government in postwar South Korea (1945-1948) [Link]
  • 📅 Apr 20, 2022 Gave a talk at the 95th Meeting of the American Association for History of Medicine (AAHM) (Saratoga Springs, NY) [Abstract]
  • 📅 Apr 12, 2022 Completed the term at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. as a Korea Foundation Junior Scholar (Washington, D.C.) [Profile]

Current Research Topics

  • The history of medicine (health care systems) from the 1930s to the 1980s in the transpacific region (North/South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the US) in the context of the Cold War and post-colonialism.
  • What role did the Empire of Japan’s wartime medicine and American medicine play in Japan and its colonies (Korea and Taiwan) after World War II?
  • How did national leaders, government officers, physicians, and workers use medicine and public health to negotiate their agency with the Cold War superpowers and harness Cold War discourse for their own interests?
  • How did ordinary people in East Asia flip the trope of Cold War discourse for their own interests?

What I did

  • The comparison of health care system models among major Korean political groups and the US military government based on their political orientation right after the independence from the Empire of Japan
  • What role did the allegation of biological warfare during the Korean War play in formulating North Korea’s characteristic way of using scientific knowledge in domestic public health campaigns and international politics during the Cold War?

Inspiration

My academic curiosity was sparked by one simple question:

Why did the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMIGIK) attempt to establish a government-led health insurance system?

It was strange to me because the US at the time—surely, even at present—preferred a private insurance system. I believe searching for the answer to this question, which requires a transnational and interdisciplinary approach can shed light not only on the development of the health insurance system in the transpacific regions (Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the US) but also on the interactions between the themes of the Cold War and medicine.