Bridget Martin is an urban geographer and political geographer researching the US-Korea alliance through the lenses of land, territory, terrain, and sovereignty. Her research traces the logics, techniques, laws, and ambiguities that made widespread American militarized land dispossessions possible during the US military occupation of southern Korea and during the Korean War, and it critically examines the more recent process of US military land returns in the context of Korea’s highly commodified real estate environment.

Bridget will join the University of Mississippi campus as Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Korean Studies in January 2023. Her teaching interests are in Human Geography, Critical Security Studies, International/Development Studies, Political Ecology, Asian/American Studies, and Korean Studies. Students interested in working with Bridget should contact her directly.

Bridget is a member of the 2022-2023 cohort of the US-Korea NextGen Scholars Program, a two-year non-resident program in public engagement for mid-career Korea specialists. Along with Lisa Sang-mi Min, she is also the co-organizer and co-facilitator of the DMZ Field School, a workshop on field methods and experimental writing for anthropologists and geographers that held its inaugural program in February 2022 with the support of the Research Institute of Korean Studies.

Before joining the University of Mississippi campus as Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Korean Studies, Bridget was the inaugural SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences at the Korea Institute, Harvard University. She completed her PhD in Geography with a Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a predoctoral Fellow in the US-Asia Grand Strategy Program at the University of Southern California Korean Studies Institute during her final year of graduate study. Her graduate research was also supported by organizations such as the Korea Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Korean-American Educational Commission (Fulbright Korea). She holds a Master’s in Politics from The New School for Social Research.

Bridget’s writings have appeared in journals such as the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Political Geography.