Robert Winstanley-Chesters is a Research Fellow of Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific, School of Culture, History and Language as part of Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship project ‘Informal Life Politics in North East Asia.’ Robert gained his PhD in April 2013 from the University of Leeds, from which he also obtained his MA. Environment, Politics and Ideology in North Korea: Landscape as Political Project, a monograph derived from his doctoral research was published on the 16th of November, 2014, by Rowman and Littlefield’s Lexington Press. Robert was then elected a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the University of Cambridge (Beyond the Korean War Project) and appointed a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds (School of Geography). Robert’s general interests center on historical and contemporary narratives of environmental and development action and engagement in North Korea, the Korean Peninsula and the wider East Asia as well as methodological and analytical issues presented by North Korea’s ideological and political relationship with the natural world.

In 2016-2018 Robert’s research will address North Korean Animal Geographies, specifically the experience of non-human inhabitants and pets during the crisis period of the 1990s, North Korean, colonial and pre-colonial mineral memory and spaces of geological exploration and exploitation and forest and arboreal histories of the Korean Peninsula and other East Asian territories.

Robert’s second monograph, New Goddesses on Mt Paekdu: Gender, Myth, Violence and Transformation in North Korean Landscape is scheduled for publication winter 2016/2017

Recent journal articles from Robert include:

—Patriotism Begins with a Love of Courtyard: Rescaling Charismatic Landscapes in North Korea, Tiempo Devorado/Consumed Time (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Vol 2 (2), Summer 2015

—North Korean Pomiculture 1958-1967, Pragmatism and Revolution, British Association of Korean Studies BAKS Papers (16), 2015

—The Socialist Modern at Rest and Play: Spaces of Leisure in North Korea, Academic Quarter (Aalborg University), summer 2015, Vol 11

New Goddesses at Paektu Mountain: Two Contemporary Korean Myths, S/N Humanities (SNU), Vol 2(1), spring 2016 – co-authored with Victoria Ten (Leiden University)

From Dialectic of Nature to the Asian Mode: A Pre-History of North Korean Environmental Approach, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol 27 (3), 2016

Contact Robert at: r.winstanley-chesters@leeds.ac.uk or robert.winstanley-chesters@anu.edu.au and follow Robert on twitter @rwinstanleyc

Catch Robert at these forthcoming events:

Asian Studies Conference Japan 2016, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan, July 2^nd-3^rd, 2016, Narratives of Mineralogical Collaboration: North Korean and Soviet Mineralogical Development 1945-1950 in the Captured Documents Collection

Asian Studies Association of Australia 2016, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 5^th-7^th July, 2016, Informal Life Politics in Difficult and Contested Developmental Times: Sindo and its Fisherpeople.

5^th Asian Borderlands Research Network Conference, Kathmandu, Nepal, 12^th-14^th December, 2016, Navigating Geo-Politics at the Mouth of the Amnok/Yalu: Sindo and its Fisherpeople

Robert is no longer (as of 1st of January, 2016), a participant, contributor in or connected to sinonk.com – so if you have a question about Sino-NK or its work please direct your query there.