Korea
Please join us for an exciting talk. Kodo Nishimura—a queer Buddhist priest and makeup artist— will share his personal life story and, for the second half of the talk, demonstrate his artistry by making up a student. Kodo Nishimura is a global makeup artist and a Buddhist priest in the Japanese Pure Land tradition called Jōdo Shinshū. He grew up in the ever-changing city of Tokyo, in a serene Buddhist temple. As a child, he practiced Japanese flower arrangement for eight years. At the age of 18, he moved to the United States, and graduated from Parsons The New School for Design in NY...
Where should we locate the origins of modern Korea’s environmental problems? How should we organize and narrate the events, occurrences and entities of environmental history in Korea? Many assume that environmental issues emerged in the 1960s as urban problems when heavy industrialization visibly started to pollute air and water. This presentation, however, traces the origins of environmental issues in the late nineteenth century, when Chosŏn Korea joined transnational, top-down drives to modernize its agriculture. Going beyond the simplistic binary of the exploitative cities (and...
Please join the Council on East Asian Studies in celebrating the Lunar New Year. Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by February 13, 2019.
Dates: Friday, April 19 and Saturday, April 20, 2019 Locations: April 19 - Omni New Haven Hotel, Temple Conference Room April 20 - Luce Hall, Room 203 Korean Buddhist studies in Western academia has yet to develop into an identifiably distinct field of study. Fortunately, in the last decade a critical mass of scholars specializing in Korean Buddhism has begun to emerge. However, the vast majority of these scholars have appointments in other positions such as Asian religions, East Asian Buddhism, the arts, and philosophy. They also have affiliations with a wide range of departments: Religious...
Children’s literature emerged in early twentieth century Korea, and was predicated on the belief in the emotional and intellectual difference between children and adults. Dr. Zur’s interrogation of the political and social stakes in writing for children reveals that it was the bond between the child and nature that underwrote much of the fiction and poetry for children in its first four decades. This bond was broken when the atomic era, and the rules of the Cold War, rewrote humans’ relationship with nature, and when the cult of science placed children as the agents of the transformation of...
Dr. Kee Park is a Board-certified neurosurgeon with a special focus on healthcare systems in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Dr. Park is the Paul Farmer Global Surgery Scholar at the Program in Global Surgery and Social Change (PGSSC) through Harvard Medical School and the Director for DPRK Programs through the Korean-American Medical Association (KAMA). Dr. Park has received numerous humanitarian awards, including the 2014 KAMA Humanitarian Award. Dr. Park will share his insight into the potential for health systems building in the DPRK, with a special focus on global...
Join us for a conversation with LTG(R) CHUN In-Bum, former commander of the ROK Special Warfare Command, on “Peace, Denuclearization, and Reunification on the Korean Peninsula”, moderated by Professor Paul Kennedy. This is a rare opportunity to hear from a senior ROK military officer willing to speak frankly about his perspective on developments on the Korean peninsula. We hope you’ll join us! LTG(R) Chun is a graduate of the Korea Military Academy (KMA) in 1977. He was selected as the aide to LTG Lee, Ki-Baek. In 1983 General Lee, as Chairman of the ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a...
Almost three decades ago, the desecration of a pair of graves near the border with North Korea led to discovery of the “lost” grave of assistant chancellor Kwŏn Chun (1281-1352). What Kwŏn’s elegantly decorated grave revealed was a world where the elite used their wealth to infuse the afterlife with a sense of individual drama. But this world, like Kwŏn’s grave and the monastery that guarded it, was lost. It was replaced by a world regulated strictly by standardized ritual where the ancestors of families of equal social standing occupied the same, indistinguishable postmortem...
In contemporary Korean Buddhism, the Koryŏ prince and monk Ŭich’ŏn (1055–1101) is primarily remembered as the founder of the Ch’ŏnt’ae school, Korea’s Tiantai (Tendai) tradition. However, a close reading of Ŭich’ŏn’s writings contained in his Collected Works demonstrates that Ŭich’ŏn did not relinquish is membership and prestigious position in the powerful Hwaŏm school (Ch. Huayan, Jpn. Kegon) to found Ch’ŏnt’ae in Koryŏ. His life and writings rather show the close relationship between doctrinal learning and meditative visualization, and accounts of his life provide hints on the complex...
This conference will bring together scholars of South, Southeast, and East Asia for a discussion framed by the concept of a “wood age.” We will consider both the centrality of wood to material life in the premodern world and the changes brought by the industrialization of the forest. Using perspectives from social and cultural history; archeology and paleoecology; and the histories of art, architecture, science, and medicine, this conference will address the wide range of ways that people interacted with woodlands. These dialogues will help move forest history beyond the early focus on...
Part of Dr. Todd A. Henry’s current book on the role of the mass media, sexual medicine, and the police state in extracting public value from the private lives of non-normative subjects, this talk offers a critical analysis of sex change in Cold War South Korea. In forging a dialogue among Korean Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and LGBTI Studies, he seeks to produce knowledge beneficial to individuals and groups who continue to struggle against the historical forces addressed in his work. To this end, he traces how corporeal ideologies of sex dimorphism and hetero-patriarchy...
This presentation investigates the origins and the development of transnational adoption of Korean biracial children, including the symbolic meanings they carried in Korean society. It would demonstrate the representation of biracial children in Korea during the 1950s, analyze the state policies towards them, and trace the historical origins of transnational adoption of Korean children. After the 1945 liberation from the Japanese colonial rule, building a nation-state became the most urgent task for Korean society. The nationalistic discourse of kungmin, which means literally “people of the...
Interested in East Asian Studies courses? Come explore course offerings for the 2018-2019 academic year and meet the CEAS faculty, post-docs, and visiting scholars teaching exciting new courses this year. Both undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to attend this event. Snacks will be provided. Please RSVP to eastasian.stu...
A critical examination of atheism and religions (Buddhism), with a focus on intellectual, religious, philosophical, and scientific debates about God, the origin of the universe, morality, evolution, neuroscience, happiness, enlightenment, the afterlife, and karma. Readings selected from philosophical, scientific, and religious writings. Authors include some of the following: Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchins, Richard Dawkins, Deepak Chopra, Sam Harris, Owen Flanagan, Stephen Batchelor, and the Dalai Lama.
This course offers a visual history of the art objects and other material goods that people set in motion, physically and imaginatively, across the Silk Roads regions of Eurasia from antiquity through the beginnings of the medieval era. It ranges across a variety of cultural productions and sites encompassing the agrarian and nomadic zones of Eurasia from the Bronze Age through the 7th-century rise of the first Caliphates in the west and the efflorescence of the Sui-Tang cosmopolis in the east.
This seminar, geared towards those with a more extensive background in Korean studies, will focus on the genealogies and trajectories of “The Korean Council for Women drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan” (Han’guk chŏngshindae munje taech’aek hyŏbŭihoe), and map the transnational activism of the “comfort women” movement. The “comfort women” movement stands as an important example of postcolonial feminist practice and presents a clear case of how “the personal is political.” As part of this movement, the surviving “comfort women” became empowered to speak for and about themselves, and...
As the second part of KASY series of talks on Korean women, Dr. Seung-Kyung Kim, Korea Foundation Professor at Indiana University Bloomington, will look at “The Korean Council for Women drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan” (Han’guk chŏngshindae munje taech’aek hyŏbŭihoe), and map the transnational activism of the “comfort women” movement. The “comfort women” movement stands as an important example of postcolonial feminist practice and presents a clear case of how “the personal is political.” As part of this movement, the surviving “comfort women” became empowered to speak for and...
Given the significance of death to humans, an understanding of how societies conceive of death, the afterlife, and what might occur to the dead can reveal a great deal of how a given society understands its place within the cosmos. Particularly interesting are those beliefs concerning the condition of the dead after death; specifically, the nature and function of ghosts. There are numerous accounts in the literature of the Koryŏ and early Chosŏn periods in Korea that feature encounters with ghosts or beings from beyond the human world. While these accounts can be sometimes humorous or...
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