Ko, Nancy

Nancy Ko is a historian of labor, ecology, and technology in the global Mediterranean, currently completing her PhD in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her research follows the lives and labors of the world’s freedivers and spearfishers from the 18th century to the present in order to resurface the imperial intimacies of race-making between the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Pacific.

Herself an AIDA-certified Master Freediver and a direct descendant of the female freedivers of Jeju Island in the Korea Strait, Nancy has lived, dived, and conducted research in 10 languages (including Arabic, Hebrew, Ottoman & Modern Turkish, and Greek) during her time at Columbia. Her multilingual, transoceanic work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Council for American Overseas Research Centers, and the SSRC, amongst other major sources. 

Prior to beginning her studies at Columbia, Nancy read an MPhil in Modern Middle East Studies at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar (New York & Magdalen 2017), and earned a B.A. in History and Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and an undergraduate fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Her undergraduate thesis, “Civilizing Omission: French-Jewish Philanthropy and Historical Amnesia during and after the Iranian Constitutional Revolution,” was awarded the Thomas Hoopes Prize and published by Harvard Judaica Library.

For the Spring 2025 semester, Nancy has designed and is teaching the Pratt Institute’s introductory course on Global Environmental History. She has also taught in topics across history and ethics at Columbia, Harvard, and Ca'Foscari Universities, for which she was granted Harvard’s Derek Bok Teaching Award in 2021. In the 2020-21 academic year, Nancy served as co-president of the Graduate History Association.

Above sea level, Nancy’s thinking — on assisted reproductive technology; on the justificatory tales of American Zionism; and on Korea’s 1948 — has been published at The Drift and written about in The New Yorker. She was born in Staten Island and raised in south Brooklyn, where her mother still runs the family bodega.