Bonnie B.C. Oh, Ph.D., a native of South Korea, is a 64-year resident and a citizen of the United States.
After graduating from Ewha Girls’ High School and attending two years of Law College of Seoul National University, she came to the United States to complete her undergraduate education. She received B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, M.A. from Georgetown University, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She retired from Georgetown University as Distinguished Professor of Korean Studies.
A 38-year veteran in American higher education, she served as a faculty and administrator at Loyola University of Chicago, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, University of Maryland College Park (UMCP), and Georgetown University. At UMCP, she planted seeds of Asian American studies and established Asian American taskforce and wrote the report. At Georgetown, she taught courses on Korea, China, and Japan, managed Korean studies program, convened seminars and conferences, served as chair of Women’s Studies program, and as the University Ombudsperson.
She published widely on Northeast Asia region in books, refereed journals, and in encyclopedias. With her late husband, Dr. John K.C. Oh, a distinguished scholar of democracy in Korea and East Asian international relation, she co-authored Korean Embassy in America. They jointly received the 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies.
She co-authored and edited the first academic book on comfort women, The Legacies of Comfort Women of WWII (2001). Her childhood memoir, Phoenix in a Jade Bowl: Growing up Years in Korea, was published in 2013. A historical novel, Murder in the Palace, on the assassination of the late 19th c. Korean queen, was published in 2016. The same work was translated into Korean and was published in Korea in 2017. It received the third annual Palbong Literary Award in Washington, DC. She completed the manuscript on “Longing for Mother,” a story of a boy born of a Korean mother and a Japanese father during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945).
She serves on the boards of the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, the Seoul National University Alumni Association, the Ewha Girls’ High School alumni association of Chicago, the Korean American Association of Chicago, and the Korean Writers’ Association of Chicago. She volunteers at the Sheil Catholic Center of Northwestern University, and active in the committee to erect the comfort women statue in the Chicago area.
She has two daughters and a son, an MD and two JDs, and two granddaughters and six grandsons. Five have graduated from college, two in college, and one in high school.
She relocated to Evanston from Potomac, Maryland 13 years ago. [Feb. 2020]
