Korea Colloquia

2008-2009 Academic Year.


For past colloquia, please check the following links:
[1999-2000] [2000-2001] [2001-2002] [2002-2003] [2003-2004] [2004-2005] [2005-2006] [2006-2007] [2007-2008]

(For other UW Korea related lectures and events please visit the calendars at the East Asia Center, and Asian Languages and Literature.)


JUNE 10, 2008
Tuesday, 3:30-5:00 pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Stephen Epstein, Director, Asian Studies Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Yellow Dust Blows East:
Contemporary South Korean Images of China

Dr Stephen Epstein is Director of the Asian Studies Institute and the Asian Studies Programme at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He has published widely on contemporary Korean literature and society, and is currently working on a book exploring how globalization is transforming Korean identity and co-editing a volume on China-Korea relations. He has also translated several pieces of Korean and Indonesian fiction, including Yang Gui-ja's Contradictions (Cornell East Asia Series) and was a Translator in Residence with the Korean Literature Translation Institute in Seoul during 2007. The documentary he co-produced with Timothy Tangherlini , Our Nation: A Korean Punk Rock Community, has featured in numerous international festivals.

2007 marked the fifteenth anniversary of diplomatic ties between China and South Korea. The speed with which the two countries have developed a web of ties in multiple spheres has surprised some, while others interpret the depth of connections as a return to a ''natural'' compatibility that experienced rupture as a result of Japan's occupation of Korea and the Cold War years that followed. And yet, centripetal and centrifugal forces coexist: despite multiple affinities and a popular discourse of mutual interest (Korean media reports on, e.g., China's bewitchment by ''The Korean Wave,'' and Korea's preoccupation with and predominance in the study of Chinese), potential for intercultural conflict and competition remains.

Professor Epstein analyses images of China in contemporary South Korea, drawing on television news, cyberspace commentary, advertisements, and books aimed at the popular market. While Korean commentators regularly point out that China's size and diversity makes it impossible to generalize about the country, patterns of thought do emerge: China as a living instantiation of Korea's past; China as a site for both Korean opportunity and self-congratulation about its own successes; and China as a country where the ''counterfeit'' reigns supreme. I will consider the extent to which reports on the springtime meteorological phenomenon of the hwangsa, the sands that blow over Korea from the Gobi desert, have come to function as an implicit metaphor for Korean understanding of China: an unstoppable juggernaut on its doorstep that brings pollution and poses a challenge to the livelihood and well-being of the nation.


JUNE 2, 2008
Monday, 3:30-5:00 pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
David McCann, Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Director of the Korea Institute, Harvard University

Control as a Theme in Modern Korean Poetry

David R. McCann, ICAS, is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations as well as Director of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. David is the recipient of numerous prizes, grants, and fellowships including the prestigious Manhae Prize in Arts and Sciences (2004), the Daesan Foundation Translation Grant (1997), and the Korea P.E.N. Center Translation Prize (1994). His many books include Traveler Maps: Poems by Ko Un (2004), The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry (2004), Early Korean Literature: Selections and Introductions (2001), War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War (2001) and The Classical Moment: Views from Seven Literatures (1999).

Not only a renowned translator of major Korean poems but also a well-recognized poet, David has published many poems in such distinguished media as Poetry, Ploughshares, Descant, Runes and recently published a chapbook of poems Cat Bird Tree (2005). His poem "David" was included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology III. David's new book of poems The Way I Wait For You has been accepted for publication by Codhill Press and will be published this year.

National historical readings of modern Korean literature used to describe literary works as expressions of the Korean people’s feelings at the tumultuous and challenging events and circumstances of the twentieth century.  First, the issue of the modern; next, the Japanese colonial occupation; then the division and war, followed by decades of political repression.  Yet however entangled in its historical moments, literature is not a passive reflector; but what sorts of interventions can be deployed to pry it loose?  This presentation is part of a project exploring, among other things, the practice and the trope of control as thematic in a modern Korean poetry.  Was French literature translated into Korean and read because is was French?  Or because it offered a model of a certain type of control?  Control of language?  Control of income?  Control for the self, or at least the potential for a claim on autonomy?  But how is control to be demonstrated?  On whose terms? Where did Korean roads lead, and how was a walk in a park, or attendance at a wrestling match, like the reading of a poem?


MAY 28, 2008
Wednesday, 3:30-5:00 pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Pak Sunyoung, Professor, Seoul National University and Korea Studies Visiting Scholar

Height and Standard of Living in North Korea
1930s-1980s

Dr. Sunyoung Pak is a Visiting Scholar at the Jackson School’s Center for Korea Studies and an Associate Professor in the College of Social Sciences at Seoul National University. She received her Ph.D. from the Anthropology Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1995. Her research areas include women and family in North and South Korea and North East Asia.

North Korean adult refugees who arrived in South Korea during the period of year 1997 to year 2007 are analyzed to assess the changes in the biological standard of living in North Korea from 1930s to 1980s. Adult refugees are grouped by birth decade and the age-adjusted mean heights of these groups are analyzed by dummy regression. In contrast to the population of South Korea, as well as to that of most of the rest of the world, North Koreans did not experience a steady increase in physical stature from 1930s to 1980s. The divergence between the heights of North and South Koreans began among the birth cohorts of the year 1945-1954 and became increasingly pronounced thereafter. This is an indication of the adverse socio-economic circumstances prevailing in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. There has been a popular “belief” among South Korean intellectuals that up to 1970s North Koreans enjoyed better living standards than South Koreans. Although the results of this study do not support this long-held “belief,” a piece of evidence to contextualize such a claim is found in the male height trend. Even though males born in the 1970s were not significantly taller than those born in all the preceding decades, they were taller than those born in the 1960s or in the 1980s. However, judging from the trend in the longitudinal shift in height in totality, it is very likely that the improvement in living conditions in the 1970s in North Korea was short-lived and modest in degree at best.


MAY 16, 2008
Friday, 3:30-5:00 pm
Communications 226
Dr. Mark Peterson, Asian and Near Eastern Languages, Head, Korean Section, Brigham Young University

How did Korea get its History Backwards?:  a New History for Korea in the New Century

Mark Peterson received his B.A. in Asian Studies and Anthropology from Brigham Young University in 1971.  He received his M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1987, both from Harvard University in the field of East Asian Languages and Civilization.  Prior to coming to BYU in 1984 he was the director of the Fulbright program in Korea from 1978 to 1983.  He also served as the President of the Korea Pusan Mission from 1987 to 1990.  He has been the coordinator of the Asian Studies Program and was the director of the undergraduate programs in the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies.  He is currently the head of the Korean section of the department.

George Orwell said that he who owns the present, owns the past.  In Korea, the twentieth century present was one captured in the so-called old saying, "When whales fight, shrimp get their backs broken."  This saying -- not really that old -- in part of an image of Korea as a powerless victim, and the Korean historical narrative has been one of war, chaos and invasion.  As Korea becomes a more powerful nation, will the national narrative change?  Will the orthodox history re-imagine itself as something different?  This presentation will examine alternative national histories possible in the new century.


MAY 5, 2008
Monday, 3:30-5:00 pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Dr. Charles Armstrong, The Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences, Department of History and the Director of the Center for Korean Research, Columbia University

North Korea and State Terror

Charles Armstrong (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is The Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History and the Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University. A specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, Professor Armstrong has published several books on contemporary Korea, including The Koreas (Routledge, 2007), The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell, 2003), Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006), and Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State (Routledge, second edition 2006), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. His current book projects include a study of North Korean foreign relations in the Cold War era and a history of modern East Asia. Professor Armstrong is a frequent commentator in the US and international media on Korean, East Asian, and Asian-American affairs.

One of the outstanding impediments in US-DPRK relations is the presence of North Korea on the State Department list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” North Korea has been on this list since 1988, even though, according to the State Department itself, the DPRK has not sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.  In the Six-Party agreement of February 13, 2007, the United States promised to “begin the process of removing the designation of the DPRK as a state-sponsor of terrorism.” What are the justifications for North Korea to remain designated as a state that sponsors terrorism? What in fact constitutes “state-sponsored terrorism,” for the United States and in general? Is state terror only committed by “rogue nations” such as North Korea, or can other states, including perhaps the US, be considered perpetrators of state terror? Focusing on North Korea’s apparent turn to terror tactics in the 1970s and 1980s, this talk will explore the history of North Korea’s relationship to state terror and the possibilities for moving beyond the stigma of a “terror state” toward a more normal relationship with the US and the world.


APRIL 22, 2008
Tuesday, 3:30-5:00 pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Dr. Seok Gon Cho, Department of Economics, Sangji University, South Korea

Debating Colonial Modernity in Korea:
A Survey of the Controversies over Socio-economic Change under Japanese Rule

During the last thirty years, there has been considerable debate concerning the features of socio-economic change in Korea under Japanese rule. These controversies were initially sparked by the challenging argument that the Korean economy experienced a kind of modern economic growth during the colonial period. More recently the debate has turned to the standard of living of colonial Koreans. In surveying these controversies, this presentation has two aims. First, in searching for the intellectual background of these controversies Dr. Cho will show that they are related to the path of the prospects for the so-called ‘1987 Regime’ in South Korea. Second, I will provide my own analyses of some of the central points of contention in these debates such as the starting point of modern economic growth in Korea, the standard of living in colonial Korea, and the effect of colonial economic growth on the rapid development of modern South Korea.

Co-sponsored by the Japan Studies Program and East Asia Center.


FEBRUARY 15, 2008
Friday, 3:30-5:00 pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Jeongsoo Shin, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington

"Admonition for the King of Flowers": The Making of King Peony in Korean Literature

The tree peony (Paeoniaceae suffruticosa) or Mudan 牧丹 was coronated the king of the flowers in early Tang floriculture (618-906). Since then, it has enjoyed popularity in the literature of China and her neighboring countries. In the case of Korea, Confucian writers created a unique literary tradition of a floral kingdom, through reinventing the peony motif. Touching on this tradition, the presentation will focus on its earliest examplar, “Admonition for the King of Flowers,” (“Hwawang gae” 花王戒) written by Sŏl Ch’ong 薛聰 (b. 655), a Confucian scholar in Silla Dynasty (94 BCE-935 CE).

This piece has been conventionally discussed as the first adaptation of the peony motif in Korean literature, but few scholars have paid attention to another Chinese influence of fu , a major literary form in early medieval China. I will argue that the subject of a prodigal king and his vassal-adviser came from the Former Han fu (206 BCE-25 CE), and that personified flowers might be motivated by the prosopopoeia of plants in the Six Dynasties (220-589 CE) fu on objects. Moreover, all these Chinese elements comprise the author’s deliberate scheme to avoid conflict from Korean aristocrats.

The presentation will shed more light on Sŏl Ch’ong’s creation of a triangle relationship among the three flowers, reflecting the politic tension between the aristocracy and the king at that time. If Peony King and the Rose are metaphors for the authoritarian monarch King Sinmun and a privileged aristocrat, respectively, the withered anemone naturally represents the author himself, whose social status handicapped his court life, despite his remarkable scholarship. Such allegorical competition among a group of flowers is not found in the Chinese literary tradition; flowers were ordinarily likened to court ladies or sometimes a man of dignity in the case of the lotus. Therefore, the political allegory of a flower kingdom is the author’s unique achievement that will develop more sophistication in later Chosŏn (1392-1911) literature.

Co-sponsored by the China Studies Program.


FEBRUARY 11, 2008
Monday, 11:00-12:30 pm (*NOTE: TIME CHANGE*)
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Jiwon Shin, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California at Berkeley

Collecting Su Shi: Material Culture and Literati Self-Fashioning in Early Nineteenth Century Korea

Jiwon Shin, Assistant Professor, received her Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2003. She specializes in Korean literature and culture from the late Chosôn period through the modern era, focusing on issues of space and identity. Her research interests include: intersection of literature and cartographic imagination; conceptions of urban culture and literary coteries; early modern print culture; nationalist aesthetics. She is working on a book manuscript on late 18th and 19th century literary culture in Seoul. She also translates cultural theories and feminist criticisms as well as literary works from contemporary South Korea.

Although the Chinese writer Su Shi had always been considered an important model cultural figure in Korea, the early nineteenth century fascination with him is distinctly linked to the way in which material possession became a crucial means of fashioning the literati selfhood, particularly among the emerging urban elite in Seoul. The paper examines the manners in which the early nineteenth century Korean writers used their private collections of Su Shi’s poetry, calligraphies, and portraits, as well as the domestically produced duplicates of such texts, toward substantiating their literati self-image, while imagining themselves as distinct from other urban consumers. With a case study of these early nineteenth century writings on collecting Su Shi, the paper aims to consider the broader, underlying issue of the role of material culture in formulating the late Chosŏn articulation of Chinese literary tradition as property whose ownership can be transferred and claimed, as it was reproduced and re-performed in Korea.

Co-sponsored by the China Studies Program.


JANUARY 14, 2008
Monday, 3:30-5:00 pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Hyaeweol Choi, Associate Professor of Korean Studies, School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University

Competing Discourses on Modern Womanhood in Transcultural Korea

The presentation focuses on the genealogies of the "modern" woman among Korean intellectuals and American women missionaries within the context of Korea's colonization by Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. Touching on some of the major issues of modern womanhood, such as gender equality, education, participation in the public sphere, and representations of gender in the popular media, it discusses the dynamic interplay between the Confucian-prescribed gender ideology of Korea, the nationalistic desires for nation-building among Korean intellectuals, and the Christian gender ethics of women missionaries. The analysis emphasizes both institutional and discursive endeavors of Koreans and Americans in fashioning modern womanhood in accord with their own mandates-either nationalist, Christian or secular modern. In so doing, the presentation intends to shed light on the ways in which competing narratives on modern womanhood reconfigured Confucian gender ideology for the modern era and also reveals the tensions that women experienced between their newly-found space for emancipation and other forms of social and political control over their bodies and subjectivities.


DECEMBER 3, 2007
Monday, 11:45-1:15 pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Ronald Toby, Associate Professor of History, East Asian Studies, and Anthropology, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Mountain that Needs No Interpreter: Mt. Fuji and the Engagement of the Foreign

Professor Toby specializes in Premodern and early-modern Japan; early-modern popular culture; seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Japanese foreign relations; and intraregional relations in premodern Asia. His current research interests include the representations of the foreign in popular culture, 1550-1850; East Asian international history; and village and rural credit. Selected publications include State and Diplomacy in Early-Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Princeton University Press, 1984; Stanford University Press, 1991); with Kuroda Hideo, Gyoretsu to misemono (Asahi Newspaper Company Publishing, 1994); and "The Indianness of Iberia and Changing Iconographies of Other," in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart Schwartz (Cambridge University Press, 1994) 323-351. Professor Toby received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1977.

Mt. Fuji, as likely as the ‘rising sun’ flag to call up the image of ‘Japan’ around the world today, was unfamiliar to most Japanese, except as literary allusion, before the Edo period. Mt. Fuji arose as a nationally recognized symbol of the country only after Edo—in the shadow of the mountain—became the political center of the country. The imagined foreign/foreigner was also implicated in the mountain’s revaluation, however, and a crucial, enduring element of the ‘new,’ international Mt. Fuji emerged from Hideyoshi’s failed invasions of Korea. In this presentation, we examine the way Korea, Koreans, and other alien peoples and places were deployed in literary, visual, and performative dialog with Mt. Fuji, transforming the mountain into a multivalent ideological symbol, both attractive and welcoming, yet at the same time threatening, aggressive and expansionist.

Co-sponsored by the Japan Studies Program, Center for Korea Studies, and the East Asia Center.


NOVEMBER 30, 2007
Friday, 3:30-5:00 pm
Thomson Hall, Room 317
Jeong-il Lee, Co-adjunct Professor, Foreign Languages and Humanities, Los Angeles City College

Engaging the Late Ming in Chosôn Korea, China and Civilization from a Historical Perspective

The discourse on civilization and the practice of power relations continually overlapped in pre-modern East Asia long before the arrival of western-style imperialism. As is well known, China had been a strong state sufficient to claim its geopolitical dominance as the Great Imperium (中國 Zhongguo) and cultural influence as the Center of Civilization (中華 Zhonghua) vis-à-vis other neighboring areas of East Asia.

Meanwhile, Chosôn Korea (1392-1910) was active in appropriating the Confucian cultural policies to a civilized order of its own. Ming China (1368-1644) sought peace with Chosôn in cultural solidarity while downgrading their surrounding Mongolian and Manchurian contenders to barbarians. The emergence of the Manchurian Qing (1644-1911) China did little to disfigure the above regional dynamics linking (geo-) politics and civilization. In this context, I explore how the Chosôn court and elites re-imagined the historicity of their own Confucian tradition by valorizing the erstwhile Ming, and consolidated their dominance, based on the traditional status system, over Chosôn against the rest of the Chosôn society as well as Qing China. 

Instead of the top-down paradigm of Chinese originality versus non-Chinese replication, my presentation illuminates the degree to which the pre-modern Korean ruling elites were able to channel the influence of the Sino-centric world system and the Confucian civilization into the enhancement of their state legitimacy and cultural progress in the post-Ming era. This will capture one of the manners in which diverse human agencies outside of China fashioned a non-Chinese dimension of Pax Sinica and Sinophile trend in order to justify their practical engagements.


OCTOBER 22, 2007
Monday, 12:30-1:30 pm
William H. Gates Hall, Room 115
Professor Kuk Cho, College of Law, Seoul National University, Korea

Critical Controversies in Korean Criminal Law

Criminal law in post-democratization Korea has been fraught with controversy. There are at least three major areas of division reflecting conflicting views in the areas of morality, gender and politics. First, Korean criminal law is moralistic, including with respect to the criminalization of adultery and soft-core pornography. Second, the law is male-centered, including with respect to rape law. Third, Korean criminal law is state-dominated; examples include the National Security Act and the criminalization of conscientious objection to military service. A critical examination of these characteristics of Korean criminal law will reveal valuable lessons for Korea and other newly democratized societies.

The Asian Law Center of the University of Washington School of Law is pleased to host Professor Kuk Cho of Seoul National University’s College of Law, for an presentation and discussion of these issues. Prof. Cho has written and published extensively on Korean criminal law and other legal issues in both the U.S. and Korea. Prof. Cho obtained his S.J.D. and L.L.M. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, and L.L.M. and L.L.B. degrees from Seoul National University.

For additional information, please contact Prof. Yong-Sung Jonathan Kang (jonakang@u.washington.edu