Minsoo Kang is a historian specializing in the intellectual and cultural history of Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a fiction writer. Due to his father's occupation as a diplomat for South Korea, Kang has lived in Korea, Austria, New Zealand, Iran, Brunei, Germany, United States, and other places for shorter periods. He served in the army of the Republic of Korea and earned his Ph.D. in European History at UCLA. He is an associate professor at the history department of University of Missouri - St. Louis. With the publication of his book on the history of automata - Sublime Dreams of Living Machines (2011: Harvard University Press) - he is currently working on understanding automata from the perspective of gender theory, and a novel about automata. His short story 'A Fearful Symmetry' from his book of stories - Of Tales and Enigmas (2007: Prime Books) - was included in the 2007 'Year's Best Fantasy and Horror' collection.