Minsoo Kang

Minsoo Kang is a historian and fiction writer specializing in Western Europe's intellectual and cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Kang, an associate professor of European intellectual history in the Department of History at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, is also an expert on the history of automata in science and fiction.

Due to his father's occupation as a diplomat for South Korea, Kang has lived in Korea, Austria, New Zealand, Iran, Brunei, Germany, the United States, and other places for shorter periods. He served in the army of the Republic of Korea and earned his Ph.D. in European History at UCLA. He is an associate professor at the history department of the University of Missouri - St. Louis. He is the author of the history book 'Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination' (2011: Harvard University Press), the short story collection Of Tales and Enigmas (2006: Prime Books), and the translator of the Penguin Classics edition of the Korean novel 'The Story of Hong Gildong' (2016). His short story “A Fearful Symmetry” was included in the 2007 Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collection, and “The Sacrifice of the Hanged Monkey” in the 2018 The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy.

Minsoo’s debut novel, The Melancholy of Untold History, will arrive in bookstores from William Morrow on July 16, 2024.