About
Areas of Research: U.S. 19th & 20th Century, Capitalism, Anti-monopoly, Consumer Culture, Environment, & Energy.
Minseok’s current research, “Kerosene is King: Kerosene Consumers and the Antitrust Movement Against Standard Oil,” examines anti-monopoly politics around the dissolution of Standard Oil in 1911 with a lens of the energy experiences and consumer culture of kerosene users. As a doctoral student, he plans to expand his research to cover other environmental contexts beneath the antitrust movement against the company—such as materiality of petroleum, oil producers’ perception of nature, power struggles around technologies, and the evolution of commodity chains.
Advisor: Dr. Kendra Smith-Howard