Kyungtaek Kwon was educated in Seoul, Moscow, and New York before enrolling at Emory. His research interest is the construction and development of the Russian Far Eastern city Komsomol’sk-na-Amure in Stalin’s era. He enjoys travelling to Russian provincial cities and hopes to visit Magadan, Noril’sk, and Vorkuta. He is the winner of the 2018 SCSS (Southern Conference on Slavic Studies) best graduate student paper award. The paper title is “The Boundary of Komsomol’tsy Between Heroes and Vydvizhentsy in the Soviet Far Eastern City of Komsomol’sk-na-Amure in the 1930s.”