Minsoo Kang is a professor in European history, with speciality in the cultural and intellectual history of France, England, and Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He received his Ph.D. in June of 2004 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he wrote his dissertation on the automaton as a cultural and intellectual symbol in the European imagination. 

Other areas of his interests include the history of science and technology, literary history - especially the use of science fiction for the study of history, global history - especially East Asian - European contact in the early modern period, and Korean history. In addition to articles in numerous journals he is the author of Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2010) and a co-editor of Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830 - 1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe.