Abstract

North Korean cinema, showcased in both theaters and television broadcasts, has been deemed as an often misunderstood and enigmatic facet of world cinema since its inception, struggling to attain its rightful recognition on the global stage. Contrary to prevailing perceptions, North Korean films extend beyond mere ad nauseam didactic messages pertaining to the party, homeland, and leadership, instead featuring elements of entertainment that encompass a broad spectrum of content and form.

Dr. Gabor Sebo’s in-depth analysis uncovers a diverse range of focal points spanning different cinematic decades, in accordance with a rich array of film genres, thereby challenging the stereotypical misconception about the exclusively propagandistic nature of North Korean film imagery. To comprehensively interpret the heterogeneous cinematic and television productions of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), a semiotic approach is indispensable, delving into the analysis of signs and symbols within their respective historical and political contexts.

While North Korean film remains marginalized in film critical discourses, it has garnered substantial popularity among domestic audiences, often recognized as some of the world’s most ardent film consumers. This dichotomy underscores the discrepancy between international perceptions of North Korean cinema and its reception within the country, offering a nuanced and multifaceted glimpse into the DPRK cultural plethora.

Sebo’s study endeavors to illuminate the cinematic landscape of the DPRK, demonstrating it as a visual source of popular entertainment. Through an exploration of the evolution of North Korean cinema, his talk aspires to offer an objective understanding of this underexplored and neglected cultural terrain.

About the Speaker

Dr. Gabor Sebo, a scholar specializing in North Korean Studies with a focus on Unification Policies, earned his Ph.D. from Korea University in 2018. In the academic year 2019/2020, he served as a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a research stint at the Research Institution of Korean Studies (RIKS) at Korea University as a visiting scholar. During the academic year 2021/2022, he assumed the role of a university lecturer at Yonsei University, teaching four undergraduate courses. In 2023/2024, Dr. Sebo holds the position of a visiting research fellow at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies (KIKS) at Seoul National University (SNU). Currently, his scholarly focus centers on the composition of a monograph elucidating North Korean cinema.

Constructing Religion in Korea under Japanese and American Rule

Presented by John G. Grisafi, Yale University.

The event will take place on September 27, 9:00 am (Seoul Time), September 26, 5:00 pm (Los Angeles Time), September 26, 8:00 pm (New York Time).

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Abstract

About the Speaker

John G. Grisafi is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Yale University. His interests are in Asian religions and philosophies, religious and secular modernity, and Korean history, with a research emphasis on discursive construction of religion and its impacts on society, politics, and epistemology. John’s dissertation project is on the legal and discursive construction of religion in Korea under Japanese colonial rule and US and Soviet military occupation. His other scholarship includes a study of the impacts of early pandemic discourse around Shincheonji and Covid in South Korea, published in Nova Religio in 2021. He previously earned a BA and MA in East Asian Languages & Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania.

Presented by Sang-ho Ro, Ewha Womans University

The event will take place on August 16, 09:00am Korea Standard Time / August 15, 5:00pm Los Angeles Time.

Abstract:

Korean intelligence has a long and complex history. Given its location next to China, it had received significant influences from its continental neighbor. At the same time, Korean thinkers for many centuries had endeavored to find a way of reckoning their Self between the universal and the local. In my book, Neo-Confucianism and Science in Korea, I wanted to unveil how the long-lasting tension between two bipolar, the universal and the local in Korean mentality, made an intriguing turn in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By doing so, I attempted to explore Korean epistemology beyond the pre-existing horizons of Practical Learning (Sirhak) and Western Learning (Sŏhak). Instead, I reinterpreted the discourses and the methods of Korean intellectual society in terms of reason and sense experience. Neo-Confucian rationalism and Korean empiricism, in my opinion, may better describe their mentality at the dawn of the modern era.        

Presenter:

Sang-ho Ro is an associate professor of Global Korean Studies at Ewha Womans University. Ro writes a history that examines the evolution of Korean intellectual tradition and philosophy in the late Chosŏn period and the twentieth century. His latest monograph is Neo-Confucianism and Science in Korea: Humanity and Nature, 1706-1814 (Routledge, 2021). In the book, he analyzes the intellectual dynamism that Neo-Confucianism and Western science brought in Korean epistemology. He highlights how Korean intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reformed Neo-Confucian rationalism with a new method of empiricism. Also, he contributed to two edited books; Myongdong kilgori munhwasa (Han’gukhak chungang yon’guwon ch’ulp’anbu, 2019) in Korean and Kanryu Nichiryu (Bensei shuppan, 2014) in Japanese. In the books, he worked on inter-connectedness of Korea and her neighbors, China and Japan, in intellectual tradition and daily experience. And, his other articles cover broad topics, from the history of science and technology to the history of ethnic and cultural minorities in Korea. Ro earned his Ph. D. from Princeton University and M.A. and B.A. from Seoul National University.

Presented by Martin Gehlmann, Ruhr University Bochum

The event will take place at 18:00 Central European Time/ 9:00 AM Los Angeles Time

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About the Presenter

Sacred Signs and Safe Labor: Safe Childbirth Talismans in Chosŏn Korea

Presented by Sujung Kim, DePauw University

Date: November 17th, 2022. 9:00 AM-10:30 AM (New York, EST)/ 11:00 PM—00:30 AM (Seoul) / 2:00 PM-3:30 PM (London)

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Difficult childbirth is one of the first and the most frequently occurring issues in the healing discourses preserved within the Buddhist tradition. Among various ways to facilitate safe parturition, along with incantations a talisman was often used as a therapeutic method from very early on in East Asian Buddhism. Among the long-standing tradition of healing talismans, this talk attends to the case of a safe childbirth talisman popularized during the Chosŏn (1392–1910) period in Korean Buddhism. By focusing on a safe childbirth talisman found at the end of the Great Dharani of the Buddha’s Uṣṇīṣa [Crown] Heart of Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva (Kr. Pulchŏngsim kwanseŭm tae tarani佛頂心觀世音菩薩大陀羅尼), the talk demonstrates how talismanic treatment—interwoven with traditional Buddhist healing methods and Chinese medical knowledge—dealt with the dangers and difficulties of childbirth and how “ritual healing” was perceived, processed, and negotiated in Chosŏn Buddhism, as well as the Chosŏn society at large.

About the Presenter

Sujung KIM is associate professor of religious studies at DePauw University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2014 and her M.A. in Buddhist Philosophy from Korea University in 2007. Sujung joined the DePauw faculty in 2014 and since then she has taught a wide range of courses on Buddhism and East Asian religions. While her research primarily centers on the premodern transcultural interactions between Japanese and Korean religions, her interdisciplinary research interests also include modern/contemporary Korean Buddhism. Her first book, Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019) focuses on a deity called Shinra Myōjin. The book explains that Shinra Myojin is not only an influential protector god of the Onjōji temple in Japan, but also part of the transnational network of people, ideas, and gods, spanning China, Korea, and Japan. Currently, Sujung is working on her second book project tentatively titled, Korean Magical Medicine: Buddhist Healing Talismans in Chosŏn Korea, which she investigates the religious, historical, and iconographic dimensions of healing talismans produced in Buddhist settings during the Chosŏn period. Although its primary focus is Buddhist healing talismans in Chosŏn Korea, the book also locates itself in the broader East Asian context, aiming at showing the complex web of talismanic culture in East Asia. This book project is supported by ACLS/Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation (AY 2021–2022).

Songhee Lee: From Yŏllyŏ (烈女) to Female Marshal Heroes: the Changing subjecthood of Neo-Confucianist Moral Agency in Late Chosŏn Korea 

Presented by Dr. Lee Songhee, Research Professor, the Outreach Center for Korean Linguistic, Literary, and Culture Studies, Korea University

Date: March 2, 2022 Wednesday, 4:00pm (Los Angeles) / March 2, Wednesday, 7:00pm (Boston) / March 3, Thursday, 00:00am (Paris) / March 3, Thursday, 9:00am (Seoul)

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The patriarchal system of late Chosŏn society is held responsible for the oppression of Korean women, culminating in the trope of female chastity Yŏllyŏ (烈女) women embracing death for sexual chastity. The ideological entrenchment of this oppressive female virtue occurred in the wake of two catastrophic wars—the Hideyoshi’s invasion and the Manchu invasion. The resultant societal dislocation, it is thought, drove the governing elites to double down on Neo-Confucian orthodoxy and drive it down to the lower social strata by means of proliferating quotidian official rewards and sanctions. Women were defined exclusively by their relationship to patriarchal authority. It is in this context that Korean women faced stultifying moral subordination in the domestic setting and exclusion from public space.

I situate this talk on the literary genre prominently featuring female marshal heroes of the late Chosŏn period against the grain of this conventional view. The emergent narrative genre in which female characters manifest battlefield valor and apparently masculine Confucian virtues gained wide acceptance even as ruling elites debated whether females possess such faculties in the first place. In their often fabulous narrative of marshal and military prowess in the defense of the king and country, female characters represented more than just literary chastisement for masculine moral shortcomings: it captures a changing conception of female subjecthood.

In explaining this, I relate these works to their political and intellectual contexts. With King Yŏngjo (1724-1876)’s accession to the throne, the political strife at the court was dominated by the dispute of the loyal vs. treacherous subjects (忠逆是非) on the one hand, and the question over the moral agency in human nature on the other. We could identify the late Chosŏn elites wrestling with the sprawling implications of the Neo-Confucian moral doctrine that every human could and ought to exercise his or her own agency. The Noron (老論) -Nakron (洛論) faction, the most dominant political and intellectual force in the 18th Century, had put forward their belief that every human being, regardless of their sex, age, station or innate character, has internal faculties to meet the ethical demands of Neo-Confucian moral precepts, as the Horon-Nakron debate (湖洛論爭) tentatively concluded. 

With female personhood invested with moral agency equal to its male counterpart, the scope for female virtue was determined by the evidence of her own ethical achievement to pursue the universal good as defined by the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. Defying the restrictive expectation, the assessment of female moral worthiness grew to the degree that rendered sexual distinction moot on a conceptual level. The result is the gradual acceptance of the representation of female heroines in late Chosŏn, which paved the way for the figure of Madam Patriot (愛國婦人) in the early 20th Century.

About the Speaker

Songhee Lee is a Research Professor in the Outreach Center for Korean Linguistic, Literary, and Culture Studies at Korea University, where she also earned her doctoral degree in 2021. Her dissertation, “노론-낙론계 윤리주체의 형성과 전개” (Formation and Secularization of Neo-Confucian Self of the School of Noron-Nakron in Late Chosŏn Korea), restores the linguistic context of moral politics of Neo-Confucian theory on human nature [心性論] in late Chosŏn Korea. Centering on the Neo-Confucian theory of the acquisition of moral agency, she tracks the intellectual debates on the metaphysical foundation of human nature in tandem with the shifting royal and court rhetoric on political legitimacy. Her research interests focus on the relation between Neo-Confucian moral philosophy and political rhetoric in Chosŏn, bridging modern and premodern ideas of political agency in Korea, and major linguistic turns in late Chosŏn related to 對明義理, 忠逆是非, and Western Learning.

Limits to Sinocentrism: Persistence of Nativist Discourses of Identity in Chosŏn Korea

Presented by Dr. Ilsoo Cho, Postdoctoral Fellow, Kyoto University

Date: January 11, 2022 Tuesday, 4:00pm (PDT) / January 11, Tuesday, 7:00pm (EDT) / January 12, Wednesday, 9:00am (KST) / November 3, Wednesday, 00:00am (GMT)

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Over the past generation, scholars have actively brought the sweeping legacy of the Mongol empire to light. Far from being a fleeting experience, the Mongol dominance over much of eastern Eurasia fundamentally altered the political cultures of the countries it ruled. Aiming to recreate the world-empire of Chinggis and Khubilai, what historian Timothy Brook translates as the “Great State” (M. yeke ulus), the early Ming rulers sought to incorporate all existing polities into a reinvigorated Sinocentric system. The Mongol experience also fundamentally changed Korea. The Koreans no longer saw themselves occupying an independent imperial sphere of their own, as they did so before the Mongol conquest, and internalized the Sinocentric worldview and Korea’s predetermined inferior position within it. In other words, through the Mongol experience, the Korean elites started to voluntarily self-identify their country as a vassal of the empire. In this sense, Ming China and Chosŏn Korea ideologically aligned themselves in tandem in creating the post-Yuan world order.

There is no denying the momentous impact the Mongols had, among other things, on the histories of China and Korea and the nature of post-Yuan Sino-Korean relations. But the Korean internalization of the Sinocentric worldview did not mean that the Koreans of Chosŏn imagined or operated their country only as a vassal of the Chinese empire or forgot about the nativist identity that existed before the Mongol subjugation. This presentation aims to reveal some of the nativist discourses of identity from Koryŏ that survived into the Chosŏn period. Designed to position Korea as a historical “rival” of China, these nativist discourses sought to magnify the world-historical significance of Korea. They argued that the Korean peninsula somehow paralleled China proper as a geographical entity, and the Chosŏn people’s ancestors “defeated” the unified empires of Sui and Tang China on the battlefields. By examining such discourses of nativism in Chosŏn, this presentation argues that the Chosŏn acceptance of Sinocentrism was far from total, and a sense of Korean identity as an independent geopolitical entity survived Korea’s subservience to Beijing.

About the Presenter

Ilsoo Cho (Ph.D. Harvard University 2017) is Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Kyoto University. He works on the history of Korean foreign relations, primarily focusing on how the Korean policymakers and elites of Chosŏn responded to the Ming-Qing transition and the rise of Tokugawa Japan over the 17th century. His most recent publication is "Imperial Loyalism and Political Fissures in Early Modern Japan" (Journal of Japanese Studies, 2021).

Emperor Between the Lines: Private Channels of Imperial Desire in Early Chosŏn-Ming Relations

Presented by Professor JUNG Donghun, Seoul National University of Education

Date: November 2, Tuesday, 5:00pm (PDT) / November 2, Tuesday, 8:00pm (EDT) / November 3, Wednesday, 9:00am (KST) / November 3, Wednesday, 00:00am (GMT)

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Scholars have primarily analyzed the Chosŏn-Ming relations through the records left behind by the official machineries of state. While useful in tracking issues related to state-to-state interactions, such tendency also obscures other forms of interactions that have shaped the history of Chosŏn-Ming relations. This presentation introduces a hitherto little-known dimension in the bilateral relationship by focusing on the ways the Ming emperors, Yongle (r. 1402-1424) and Xuande (r. 1425-1435) in particular, utilized private, undocumented channels to manage the Ming’s relationship with Chosŏn Korea. And I would like to reveal a case of manipulation of Chinese history books that have not left any of these records.

At the official level, the Ming emperors maintained the empire’s Korea policy in tandem with the officialdom, leaving behind an extensive paper trail. The Ming officials recorded policy-related conversations for posterity and delivered formally written messages to Chosŏn. The Ming emperors and his officials utilized this official channel to manage issues of national importance such as horse trade or dealings with the Jurchens. However, emperors such as the aforementioned Yongle or Xuande maintained an unofficial, private channel as well. Both Yongle and Xuande ordered eunuchs to deliver unwritten messages to Chosŏn, repeatedly demanding beautiful women, falcons, rare food items, and even female cooks. The activities of such channel ended with the ascension of Zhengtong Emperor (r. 1435-1449; 1457-1464), who, for reasons personal and otherwise, did not make use of such private channels to interact with Chosŏn. Furthermore, Zhengtong even sent many of the Korean women who served his predecessors back to Chosŏn.

Both the Ming and Chosŏn remembered this history of private interactions differently. On the Korean side, records such as the Veritable Records of Sejong interpreted such private interactions as immoral, sometimes criticizing the Ming emperors as foolishly greedy. In China, Zhengtong Emperor’s officials even worked to “erase” the traces of such private channels. For instance, the so-called “three Yangs,” Yang Shiqi (1364-1444), Yang Rong (1371-1440) and Yang Pu (1372-1446), influential officials who worked on the compilation of the Veritable Records of Xuande Emperor, manipulated historical records in the process of compilation to make it look as if Xuande Emperor willingly chose not to use such channels of private interaction. This presentation concludes with an examination of politics behind such manipulations of history in the context of Sino-Korean relations.

About the Presenter

JUNG Donghun (Ph.D. Seoul National University 2016) is an assistant professor at Seoul National University of Education. He majored in premodern Korea-China relations, especially from the 10th to the 15th centuries. He claimed to be an expert in documents and wrote a doctoral thesis on diplomatic documents during the Goryeo Dynasty, but in fact, he traces the reality, institutions, and practices of diplomacy that were not included in the documents. Recently, he is interested in revealing how memories and records of history are made, transmitted, and how they are misunderstood, distorted, and manipulated. He is spending his days fighting them, questioning past historians and their records.

Late Nineteenth Century Ching-Chosŏn (淸-朝鮮) Union of Upper State (上國)     and Subject State (屬邦/屬國) – 上屬體制

Presented by CHUN Jihoon

PhD candidate at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (AREA Ruhr doctoral program on Transnational Institution Building and Transnational Identities in East Asia)

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Talk is scheduled for 8:00—9:30 AM Pacific/California; 5:00—6:30 PM Central European (Summer) Time

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Ching-Chosŏn (淸-朝鮮) mutuality during the late nineteenth century is the key aspect to characterize the East Asian political upheavals during the nineteenth century. In order for the bilateral relations to be duly understood in their intrinsic subjectivity, the official discourses produced by the ruling elites of both dynasties at the time – instead of any interpretive frames projected onto them later on, such as ‘tribute/tributary system’, ‘multilateral imperialism introduced by the Ching to Chosŏn’, or ‘Zongfan (宗藩) system’ – should be critically examined anew. Existing primary historical sources indicate that 上國-屬邦 (“upper state”, “subject state”), and 屬邦體制 (“subject state-system”), encapsulated such Ching-Chosŏn interdependency particularly during the late nineteenth century. 上國 was matched with “confederation”, “federal government”, “central government” (of a (con-)federal union), among other terms, in corresponding texts of some prominent Western legal treatises translated in East Asia since the 1860s. Also, the term 屬邦/屬國 (subject state, dependent polity), to be paired with 上國, tended to signify semi-sovereign (半主) polity that depended on more powerful polities’ protection, as did 屛藩 (outer vassal) and 藩屬 (vassal dependency).

This complementing pair of 上國-屬邦, which was used to officially designate the Ching-Chosŏn dyadic union by the contemporary elites, suggests a hierarchy of sovereignty, composed of superior sovereignty of higher-authority upper state as the protector, and subordinate sovereignty of subject state as the protected. The superior sovereignty of upper state within the East Asian context seems to have been represented as “suzerainty.” The Ching-Chosŏn union was such that suzerain-vassal (or overlord-lord) relations and protectorate, both in Western sense, on the one hand, and a (con-)federal polity in a Confucian imperial formation, on the other, were all synthesized in a transcendental construct for coordinated military and diplomatic functions to its one grand negotiated sovereignty. The appellation of 皇淸朝鮮, or imperial-Ching-Chosŏn, may connote such an East Asian construct. 

About the Speaker

CHUN Jihoon, PhD candidate at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (AREA Ruhr doctoral program on Transnational Institution Building and Transnational Identities in East Asia), is currently working on a dissertation project titled “"Cherishing the Small, Serving the Great" [字小事大] Collapsed upon "Public Law of All Nations" [萬國公法]: Ching-Chosŏn [淸-朝鮮] Union of Upper State and Subject State During 1882-1895.” The project examines Ching-Chosŏn contemporary elites’ perceptions of each other’s polity in the context of how the interpretations, doctrines, and power rationales of "international law" became manifest in their bilateral relations. In 2019, he conducted field research at Tsinghua University and Shanghai University. At Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2018, he taught a seminar course on North Korean leadership and Juche (主體) Ideology. As Korea Foundation Junior Scholar, he was affiliated with the North Korea International Documentation Project of the History and Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholar in Washington, D.C., in 2014.

Cheonha do 天下圖 and the Reception of Renaissance Geography in Late Joseon Korea

Presented by Dr. Jeanhyoung Soh

Cheonha do 天下圖 (Map of All Under Heaven), which was circulated widely in Korea from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, is famous for the mixture reflecting the new geographic information from Europe and the traditional geographic thought. In Cheonha do, the Earth is depicted as round, and the continents and islands are filled with strange countries of the Shanhai jing. It started appearing after the circulation and reproduction of the Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤輿萬國全圖, the “Wanguo quantu” 萬國全圖 (1623) included in the Zhifang waiji 職方外紀 (1623), and the Kunyu quantu 坤輿全圖 (1674) in Korea. The authors of Cheonha do, however, were generally anonymous, so it is not easy to interpret their intentions in making such maps. The maps themselves also give us little background information. 

To understand this unique map, we need to reconstruct the context that relates the maps to a wide range of texts, from literati’s writings to novels. In reconstructing the intellectual context that gave rise to the Cheonha do, I show how the literati’s various writings articulate a desire to know about the countries outside of the Chinese tributary system, which did not always lead to openness. In this presentation, I explain how the hospitality and hostility to countries outside of the Chinese tributary system were based on the newly constructed fictional thinking -influenced by the incoming geographic knowledge- and then argue that Cheonha do reflects both the reception of new geographic knowledge as well as an extension of the idea of a central Chinese civilization (Zhonghua 中華).   

About the speaker

Dr. Jeanhyoung Soh (Ph.D Seoul National University 2016) is a research fellow at the Institute of Humanities, Seoul University. Dr. Soh is a political and intellectual historian of Early Modern Korea, focusing on political language and rhetoric in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is working on Jesuit translations of Aristotles’ works, Renaissance maps, and catechisms that caused Korean political language and thought to change. She was a Henry Luce postdoctoral fellow at The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, the University of San Francisco, in 2018. She recently organized the international workshop “Aristoteles Asianus: Aristotles' works, the Coimbra texts, and Jesuits’ Chinese translations in the seventeenth century.”

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Cultural Diversity in Iron Age Korea–The Case of Mahan

Presented by Dr. Jack Davey

The southern Korean Iron Age (400 BC to 400 AD) encompasses the tumultuous transition from prehistory to history on the southern portion of the Korean peninsula. Chief among the many socio-cultural transformations that characterize this short period was the emergence of the historical kingdoms of Silla, Paekche, and the Kaya polities. While often characterized as a mere liminal or developmental phase of Korean history, recent archaeological research on Korean Iron Age polities have forced us to question many of the foundational assumptions of early East Asian history: the centrality of China in driving early East Asian interaction and social development, the timing and nature of early complex polities in northeast Asia, and the cultural cohesion of early China and Korea. Additionally, as the historiographical foundation for all subsequent kingdoms and dynasties on the peninsula, investigations of Iron Age cultures have implications for how we understand heritage and identity in Korean history more broadly.

This discussion uses the material traces of mortuary ritual to reconsider the boundaries and socio-political development of Mahan 馬韓; a cultural designation for a number of Iron Age polities or statelets on the southwestern Korean peninsula that first appeared in Chinese sources of the third century. Mahan is deeply entangled in a long historical tradition and contemporary Korean identities and its diverse mortuary record gives us the opportunity to explore dynamic flows of interaction that depart from the typical Sino-centric models of interaction and neo-evolutionary frameworks of social development. I offer here a preliminary review of the mortuary archaeology of southwestern Korea that questions the validity of Mahan as a classificatory term and advances a new methodology for reconciling a diverse mortuary record with historical narratives.

About the Presenter

Jack Davey (Ph.D. UCLA 2014) is an archaeologist and Early Koreanist specializing in the Iron Age of peripheral East Asia and the early states of Proto-Three Kingdoms Period Korea. He has been a part-time faculty member at George Washington University since 2019 where teaches courses on the history and archaeology of Early Korea as well as the geopolitical ramifications of historical disputes in East Asia. Since 2020, he has also been the Managing Editor of The Journal of Korean Studies where he seeks to foster interesting, inter-disciplinary scholarship that challenges how we understand Korea as an analytic category.

His current book project, Ritual Frontiers of Early East Asia, examines the relationship between ritual, the natural environment, and culture contact in Iron Age Korea. He argues that it was the simultaneous incorporation, evolution, and rejection of Han Chinese mortuary practices that facilitated the consolidation of the first historical kingdoms in Manchuria, Korea, and Japan. His findings recast the role of interaction in the state formation process, expose the granular mechanisms of exchange among early polities, and reconsider traditional historical narratives in Chinese sources.

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Chosŏn-Qing Informal Diplomacy and the Opening of Korea, 1876

Presented by Dr. Song Yeol Han

Informal diplomacy refers to the process of personal interactions as crucial elements that often determined the sustainability and efficacy of diplomatic relations between states (Sowerby 2016). The informal diplomacy in early modern East Asia and, in particular, was a site of diplomatic and cultural exchanges to create legitimacy and means of control over internal as well as external challenges. This study focuses on Chosŏn’s informal diplomacy with Qing that foreshadowed Chosŏn Korea’s new diplomatic engagement with Japan in the 1870s. The gunboat diplomacy and economic penetration by Euro-American industrial powers in the nineteenth century required East Asian states to gather intelligence on changing geopolitical conditions and formulate diplomatic counterstrategies.

This study shed light on Kang Wi (姜瑋, 1820–1884), an intellectual who lived at the margin of established social and international order in East Asia. Kang Wi was exposed to both China and Japan in a crucial period, during which both states and individuals were invested heavily in strategic thinking. He had cultivated great potential for Chosŏn Korea’s new diplomatic engagement in the late 1870s. Comparing Kang Wi’s personal account with official diplomatic accounts produced, circulated, and archived by aristocratic court historians provides a unique window that led us to reexamine the process the political and intellectual process toward the 1876 peace agreement as a culmination of Qing and Chosŏn’s concerted effort to grapple with geopolitical uncertainties and anxieties.

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About the Author

Dr. Song Yeol Han is a lecturer at East Asia International College in Yonsei University, Wonju campus. Dr. Han is a cultural and intellectual historian of Modern Korea and specializes in the study of Korea’s cultural, intellectual transformation through a comparative understanding of Korea’s recent past in the context of East-West and Intra–Asian connections. He is working on a book project titled “Beyond Nation: Sinographic Network and Korean Nationhood.” By examining the cultural and intellectual history of sinographic literature and transnational discursive practices in modern Korea, it offers a new approach to the question of China and its relation to Korea and how that complicated political and social agenda in the making of Korean Nationhood. Before coming to Yonsei University, he taught at Dickinson College and Seton Hall University.

For more on Dr. Han’s research, see his dissertation:

https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp01cf95jf22n

Chosŏn Cartography in Trans-regional Context

Presented by Alexander Akin

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Alexander Akin (Harvard University, 2009) has published a number of articles on East Asian maps and edited the English translation of The Artistry of Early Korean Cartography (Tamal Vista Publications, 2008). He co-owns Bolerium Books in San Francisco.

In his new book, East Asian Cartographic Print Culture: The Late Ming Publishing Boom and its Trans-Regional Connections (Amsterdam University Press), Dr. Akin examines how the expansion of publishing in the late Ming dynasty prompted changes in the nature and circulation of cartographic materials in East Asia. Focusing on mass-produced printed maps, this book investigates a series of path-breaking late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century works in genres including geographical education, military affairs, and history, analysing how maps achieved unprecedented penetration among published materials, even in the absence of major theoretical or technological changes like those that transformed contemporary European cartography. By examining contemporaneous developments in neighboring Choson Korea and Japan, the study demonstrates the crucial importance of considering the broader East Asian sphere in this period as a network of communication and publication, rather than as discrete units with separate cartographic histories. It also reexamines the place of the Jesuits in this context, arguing that their printing of maps on Ming soil should be seen as participation in the local cartographic publishing boom and its trans-regional repercussions.