Site Update (7/21/2022)
Summer greetings from the Chosŏn History Society!
We are hard at work preparing a new raft of programming for summer and fall 2022, and in order to make sure that visitors to this site are able to find the information they need, we have made a few changes that include the following:
Set a new home page that more clearly outlines our mission
Simplified navigation via the header bar
Added social media links (watch this space for future updates in this area!)
Cleaned up some graphical/grammatical issues
Updated ‘About’ page to more clearly acknowledge our parent organization, CISK
Please let us know if there are any features you’d like to see, or if you notice any broken or out of date links. Thank you, and best wishes for a pleasant summer!
Why the Choson History Society?
Read more about our mission here
Korean studies, especially premodern studies in the West is still a developing field with few, publicly accessible resources for doing scholarship. The situation is particularly dire for beginners or amateurs, but even scholars with professional training struggle with access.
To give one example, the general, interested public often relies heavily on open-source internet resources, such as Wikipedia, to complement their learning process and to study for exams, but these resources are sometimes quite poorly curated. We see this in the English-language Wikipedia articles concerning Korean history, where the bulk of the articles are low-quality and rely on low-quality source materials.
The problem of access is often thought of in terms of a wider "ivory tower" syndrome, where knowledge is locked inside the academy and inaccessible to a broader, interested audience. We believe, however, this problem can be conceived of in more specific terms, which identify opportunities for us to intervene or ameliorate in concrete ways.
A Crisis of Knowledge
First, there is currently no happy medium between popular and professional means of drawing attention to academic research. New, cutting-edge research is generally unknown to a more general, interested, learned public. At the same time, more popular transmission methods suffer from a perceived lack of intellectual rigor which can vary according to discipline.
Second, the dire state of the academic job market means that the majority of scholars trained in Korean historical subject matter (i.e. archaeology, literature, art history, history, philology, linguistics) are not generally employed by the academy. Scholars operating outside of the university system are generally poorly connected to research materials or resources, and do not possess adequate and appropriate opportunities to share their research in traditional academic channels. More importantly, scholars outside of the university system are also poorly connected to one another. All of these factors can impact individual career prospects and weaken our ability to expand knowledge production centered around Korea.
Third, existing academic networks have been weakened by COVID, massively reducing the accessibility of in-person conferences and venues and presenting additional challenges in terms of broadcasting online lectures or calls for papers. This further reduces the chances of participating in networking events or obtaining useful feedback for individual research. Existing academic programming has been adapted to the online environment in a rushed manner for which it was not designed and suffers from a lack of exposure outside of the department or sponsoring association.
Fourth, a problem that continues to face the study of Korea is the uneven international context of the discipline: research performed in certain regions outside the realm of predominant North American and European academic institutions doesn’t always receive adequate exposure. Consequently, available resources skew towards those with access to such institutions.
The combination of the above leads to numerous negative consequences. In terms of public scholarship, there is a general death of curated public resources of Korean history, in particular pre- Cold War period materials. The low quality of wikipedia pages related to Korean history is a case in point. With little editorial oversight, many such pages overly rely on dated scholarship or unreliable original research. The public therefore generally suffers from poor access to current and well-researched content, while new, current research receives very little exposure in the public realm.
Scholarship beyond the Academy
The current situation also exacerbates the “ivory-tower” problem. While much academic research is cloistered behind institutional barriers, scholars working outside of formal academic institutions risk estrangement from wider scholarly communities. The result is an overriding sense that research, especially historical research, is irrelevant beyond the walls of the academy. This situation also fosters a sense that engagement with Korea’s history must be moored to professional academic demands, trends, and obligations. As a result, whole disciplines and time periods can be completely excluded from the academic record or the professional discipline.
Unsurprisingly, there is generally low morale, not only among talented scholars cut off from academic resources, but also those within the university system. Professional academics, undergraduate students, and prospective graduate students all confront this “crisis of the humanities.” With the sense that historical research (and humanities) in general is irrelevant to life outside of the academy and must be moored to professional academic trends, it is unsurprising that course enrollments are declining across the history and humanities. Despite the gloomy outlook, Korean studies has nevertheless been buoyed by increasing enrollments in Korean language classes and growing interest in Korea’s culture and history. That is to say, there is no dearth of interest in Korea. There is however a dearth of long-term opportunities for scholarly engagement with Korea, especially its past.
The Solution
To address the above, we have created the Choson History Society (CHS), a public learned society fostering the study, research, and teaching of Korea’s past by connecting scholars working both outside and inside the professional academy.
The CHS is a community based on sharing, rather than competition or exclusivity. It provides opportunities for scholars who are operating independently or are otherwise under-resourced to share research and generate in their work. The CHS will also connect these scholars with one another, fostering a network for shared interests. Through talks, workshops, public lectures and other events, CHU will develop and host public resources for the study, research, and teaching of Korea’s past.