Nancy Ko
BIO
Nancy Ko is a historian of death and disability in the global Mediterranean. In her interdisciplinary archival research, she dives alongside the world's sea-men and -women in order to resurface how technological change has precipitated our most enduring dilemmas of body, ecology, and sovereignty. As an AIDA-certified Master Freediver and a descendant of the “sea women” of the Korea Strait, Nancy has lived, dived, and consulted archives in ten languages (chiefly Greek, Turkish, Arabic, French, and Italian) towards the realization of this mission. This interdisciplinary, multilingual work has been supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Fulbright-Hays Commission, and American Academy of Jewish Research, amongst other major sources.
Nancy is currently completing her PhD in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her dissertation, "Absorbent Empire: Free Labor and the Freediver in the Global Aegean, 1840-1956," is a forensic autopsy of the first medically-recorded cases of decompression sickness (DCS) in human history: the Aegean machine divers whose bodies still remain buried on the sponge banks of Libya and Lampedusa. Nancy's writing and thinking has also been published in The Drift and featured in The New Yorker.