City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism
Monday, March 27, 2023
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EDT
Hybrid Event
In Person, George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs, Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
And Virtual via Zoom
Event Description
Presenting from her forthcoming book, City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism, Dr. Oh will discuss how to read space and spatial practices as a writing of history. Focusing on Seoul of the 1920s under Japanese colonialism, this talk will demonstrate how the urban space became a site of discursive production for Japanese colonialism and how architecture brought about a new mode of visual experience through which a new notion of history and time was articulated. Because monumental architecture was built on top of the existing matrix of the former capital and Seoul was transformed into a living depository of heterogeneous discursive sediments, this presentation will excavate these sediments as a method of history writing and explore the material and immaterial layers of urbanity to reveal how colonial subjects engaged with, and frequently undermined, the visual regime of Japanese colonialism.
Speaker
Se-Mi Oh is Assistant Professor of Modern Korean History in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the architectural and urban practices of Seoul and explores the relationship between space and history writing. She is the author of City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism (Stanford University Press, forthcoming), which examines the relationship between language, text, and media to trace the discursive formation of modernity and colonialism in the urban space of Seoul in the 1920s.
Moderator
Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies and the Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center at GW. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She is a specialist in gender, law, and emotions in Korean history. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Sexual Desire, Crime, and Gendered Subjects: A History of Adultery Law in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.
