Hi, I'm Kevin Kester. Associate Professor of Comparative International Education and Peace/Development Studies at Seoul National University (서울대학교) and director of the Education, Conflict and Peace Lab. I research educational responses to conflict, peace and development in local and global contexts. My most recent books/special issues are The United Nations and Higher Education: Peacebuilding, Social Justice and Global Cooperation for the 21st Century (2020, Emerald Publishing), Revisiting 'Asia as Method' in Education Research: Toward Ontologies and Epistemologies of Difference (2023, Springer), Common Curriculum Guide for Peace Education in Northeast Asia (2023, UNESCO-APCEIU), and A Modern Guide to Education in East Asia: Globalization and Local Intersections (2026, Elgar Publishing). I completed my PhD and postdoc at the University of Cambridge.
Prior to moving to Seoul National University, I was Director of Studies for Education at Queens' College and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. I currently serve as Executive Editor of Teaching in Higher Education, Editor of the Asia Pacific Education Review, as a panel member of the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, and as expert reviewer for the Korean National Research Foundation. I also serve in various leadership capacities with the Comparative and International Education Society, Korean Comparative Education Society, and Korean Educational Research Association.
My current research focuses on higher education peacebuilding in conflict-affected contexts, funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea and the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies. A recent talk related to this work is online here: Healing the Scars of War: Teaching for Peace through Higher Education in Divided and Conflict-Affected Contexts, and I am currently co-editing a new Special Issue on Conflict, Peace and Teaching in Higher Education for the journal Teaching in Higher Education, to be published in 2026, as well as co-editing The International Handbook on Peace Education with Routledge. I am recipient of the 2024 Noam Chomsky Shining Star Research Award, 2024 Emerald Literati Award, 2022 Unju Prize for Research Excellence, and was commissioned as a Kentucky Colonel – the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Governor of Kentucky – in 2020.
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