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Dr Kramer’s present research explores what happens when ideas about political liberation and scientific revolution intersect. His ongoing book project, entitled “A New Kind of Energy: the Atomic Age in the Cold War Koreas,” is a comparative examination of post-1945 North and South Korean encounters with the promises and perils of a new atomic age. The study traces the conceptual foundations of a postcolonial politics that emerged across the Cold War divide. “A New Kind of Energy” examines early encounters with the atomic age across colonial, socialist, and liberal renditions of the Korean nation.

Rather than reduce the question of nuclear proliferation to the contemporary whims of political leadership or the contours of international exchange, the project focuses on the social and ideological dimensions of science in the nation building process. With implications for the broader history of global nuclear proliferation, this is the first study to comparatively explore the sociopolitical character of atomic science in two mirroring postcolonial states