Korea
Prof. Dong-One Kim is the 21st President of Korea University and a Professor at the Korea University Business School, where he has taught full-time since 1997. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, reports, and books on international labor relations and policy. Prof. Kim began his term as President of Korea University on March 2nd, 2023. His previous leadership roles in university administration include Dean of the Korea University Business School, Dean of the Graduate School of Labor Studies, Vice President for Planning and Budget, and Vice President for General Affairs at Korea...
Ji Hoon Park is a Professor of Media and Communication at Korea University. His research within the fields of media and cultural studies delves into the cultural implications of Korean entertainment. His latest article on Netflix and platform imperialism was mentioned in the New York Times. His scholarly contributions have found recognition in esteemed international journals, including the Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, and Tourism Geographies. In addition to his academic pursuits, Park is also an independent filmmaker. Notably, The New York Times offered commentary...
Lunch will be provided beginning at 1pm, courtesy of Korea University. Haerin Shin is an associate professor of Media & Communication Studies at Korea University. Shin’s research fields include Asian American literature, science fiction, and digital media with emphasis on artificial intelligence. She has written on cyberbullying, posthuman spirituality, techno-Orientalism, the ethics of artificial intelligence, and surveillance technologies, and is now working on a book on the representation of artificial intelligence in science fiction. This lecture is part of the Yale-Korea Forum, co...
The yearslong stalemate between Japan-South Korea has been thawing in the past year, with the leaders of both countries working toward rapprochement and greater trilateral cooperation with the United States. Chinese ambitions, North Korean threats and the Russian war have rallied the three allies toward greater cooperation, leading to a historic leader-level summit at Camp David in August 2023. The U.S., Japanese and South Korean officials are now working to create enduring structures that they hope would endure shifting political dynamics in the three countries. But challenges remain,...
Interested in becoming an East Asian Languages & Literatures or East Asian Studies Major? Please join us for this information session to learn more about both programs! Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by October 25th to receive the Zoom link. For more...
In the past decade, smoking has gone from being widely accepted in Korean and Japanese society to being increasingly frowned upon and regulated. Instead of depending on nonsmokers’ tolerance and smokers’ etiquette, recent reforms impose more detailed and expansive nonsmoking rules and penalties for noncompliance. As the Japanese government’s promotional materials note, the reforms move “from manners to rules” (manā kara rūru e). What explains this shift toward more legalistic governance, with formal rules and enforcement mechanisms? Smoking regulations offer an ideal case for analyzing the...
Buddhism is often presumed to be a strictly pacifist religion, thus a Buddhist military chaplain would be an oxymoron. The history of Buddhism, however, is rife with examples of Buddhists fighting wars, and foundational Buddhist scriptures address “compassionate” and “skillful” forms of warring, soldiering, and leadership. Korean Buddhism is no different, and, since 1968, the South Korean Buddhist military chaplaincy has stood as another testament to this history. Buddhist leaders and chaplains in South Korea have drawn upon scriptures popular throughout the Buddhist world to justify the...
Come learn about the organizations around campus that work on East Asia, and the opportunities they can provide to students! Organizations participating include: Yale-China Building Bridges Council on East Asian Studies The Richard U. Light Fellowship Office of Career Strategy China Hands Paul Tsai China Center, Yale Law School Yale School of Management Executive Education Yale Center Beijing
World cities and local governments are striving to find solutions to poverty and inequality in society. Seoul, the capital city of the Republic of Korea is also joining the efforts as one of the prominent world players. As the epicenter of the nation’s politics, economics, society, culture, and Hallyu, Seoul has experienced a rapid and remarkable urban transformation. The mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, who runs the city’s administration, will talk about Seoul’s active approach toward domestic and international polarization and inclusive growth, “Going together with the socially neglected...
In the mid-1900s, American missionaries employed the industrial vision of the Black intellectual Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) to instill in Koreans the ideas of “civilization and enlightenment” and economic development. Notably, American mission workers juxtaposed the situations of dispossessed African Americans with those of Koreans. This equation created the conditions through which a rhetoric of “uplift” could be articulated through their similar status on an imagined scale of race and progress. The Korean leader Yun Ch’i-ho (1865-1945), while occasionally criticizing the hypocrisy of...
In this course, students read key works of Korean literature in English translation from the early twentieth century to the present day. The specific course topic varies by semester. Primary sources include long-form novels, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction writing by representative authors, as well as literary scholarship on themes and historical context relevant to the materials. The readings in this course are arranged in roughly chronological order, requiring us to examine Korea’s colonial modernization process in the first half of the twentieth century, the authoritarian regimes of...
States of compression and acceleration are often used conceptually to refer to the rapid modernization of some Asian nations. South Korea’s “compressed modernity” and China’s “globalization on speed” capture the fast pace of industrial change, inferring not only an economic condition but also a “civilizational” one of intense social and cultural pressure on the human body to conform to the demands of the labor market. The history of “compressed modernity” in South Korea is generally conceived in socio-economic terms, continuing into a “post-compressed modernity.” These states of compression...
3:00-3:05 Welcoming Remarks Professor Hannah Shepherd Assistant Professor of History 3:05-3:10 Welcoming Remarks Professor Seungja Choi Coordinator, Korean Language Program 10-Minute Thesis Presentations 3:10-3:25 Postcolonial Memory and Traces of Seoul’s Shinto Shrines John Grisafi PhD candidate Religious Studies 3:25-3:40 A History of Her Own: Reading Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko as a Political Novel Alexandra Galloway Senior English Literature, Korean Language 3:40-3:55 A Historical and Linguistic Analysis of Honorific Speech Style Alternation...
In this course, students read key works of Korean literature in English translation from the early twentieth century to the present day. The specific course topic varies by term. Primary sources include long-form novels, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction writing by representative authors, as well as literary scholarship on themes and historical context relevant to the materials. The readings in this course are arranged in roughly chronological order, requiring us to examine Korea’s colonial modernization process in the first half of the twentieth century, the authoritarian regimes of...
This course is an interdisciplinary content-based advanced course in modern Korean. It aims to advance language skills in all four areas and cultural competence to communicate with fluency and accuracy. Students build up wide-ranging vocabulary and grammar, while registering and deepening their understanding of cultural aspects through authentic materials and communicative tasks across a variety of topics, such as social, academic, or career interests.
Munbangdo is a Korean still-life painting genre that emerged in the 18th century and continued to be popular into the mid-20th century. The paintings reflect contemporaneous global trends of collecting, display and trade. In addition to introducing the genre, the talk will focus on the depicted naturalia, their symbolism and connections to artifice and amusement. The lecture will also be broadcast over Zoom at this link. There will be a small reception with refreshments afterwards. Eleanor Soo-ah Hyun is the Associate Curator...
Who was a “Refugee”?: Returnees, Northerners, and Relief Societies in Liberated South Korea, 1945-50
At the end of the Pacific War in 1945, about 15 percent of Korea’s population was located outside Korea, having been scattered throughout the Japanese empire due to long-term migration and war mobilization. With Japan’s surrender to Allied powers, movement suddenly reversed. Millions entered South Korea, now occupied by the U.S. military, and strained the resources of the newly divided country. This talk discusses who these “refugees” were, the participation of grassroots organizations, U.S. occupation forces, and the public in creating them, and, finally, their significance in the history...
The cultural phenomenon known as Korean Wave (Hallyu) has flourished on the Chinese mainland since the 1990s, both officially and unofficially, despite looming political conflicts and cultural boycotts. Although the term Hallyu was initially coined in the Chinese context and the phenomenon has reshaped the contours of Chinese pop culture, the Sino-Korean entanglements in screen media have received little attention in English-language scholarship. Tian Li’s research theories the (re)localization of Korean screen culture in China through the concept of what she terms screen-capitalism—a system...
How can one speak and write about the self in a language that is not one’s mother tongue? Are there limitations or does the author feel a kind of liberation that does not exist in using one’s native language? How does one make language their own? This presentation explores autobiographical writings by Pahk Induk (1897-1980): September Monkey (1954) and the sequels. Pahk was born and lived in Korea until 1926, then she moved to the US first as a student and eventually becoming a permanent resident while writing her autobiographies in English. I explore the technologies of narrating one’s own...
This talk examines some of the cultural and legal ways North Korean refugees are now being groomed to become an assimilable population to the United States, with a focus on North Korean defector Yeonmi Park’s memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girls’ Journey to Freedom (2015). I argue that the North Korean people are increasingly being recognized and imagined as a potential next wave of immigrant Americans, even though there is a simultaneous political and societal refusal to practically actualize this possibility. My analysis demonstrates that contemporary representations of North...
Pages
