Event

Korean Studies Colloquium—"A Korean Murder Case at the Intersection of Migration and Crime in Late 1950s Philadelphia"

The April 25, 1958 murder of In-Ho Oh, a twenty-six-year-old South Korean graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, was swiftly solved by the Philadelphia Police Department. Within forty-eight hours after the victim’s beaten body was discovered lying in the vicinity of 36th and Hamilton streets, eleven African American youths between fifteen and nineteen years of age were arrested. The suspects’ admission that they wanted but could not gain access to a nearby dance and the recovery of the deceased’s wallet in the possession of one of them led to two conclusions: that the killing had been motivated by a robbery and that anyone could have been its target. As a matter of fact, the victimization of virtually anyone but a foreigner from South Korea was highly more probable on that Friday night. To a Koreanist accidentally coming across In-Ho Oh’s death almost six decades later, this crime continues to raise questions that call for a different type of investigation.

The talk will be given by this year’s James Joo-Jin Kim Program Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow, Justine Guichard, a graduate from Sciences Po's Resarch Master's Degree in Comparative Asian Politics, and from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO). Dr. Guichard has an Alliance Dual PhD at Sciences Po and Columbia University in Political Science.