“Politics of Geography and Transport in the Qing-Chosŏn Borderland”
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
09:00 A.M – 10:30 A.M. EST
Zoom Event
About the Event
This presentation traces the late Chosŏn discourse on roads and carts and examines the interplay between transport, the environment, and historical memory. Drawing on writings of Chosŏn scholars on the use of roads and carts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dr. Hasegawa will discuss the manner in which scholars formulated policy proposals concerning infrastructure and transport in late Chosŏn Korea. Among the scholars who put forward such proposals, he will pay particular attention to Kim Yuk (1580-1658) and Pak Chega (1750-1805), both of whom travelled through the Sino-Korean borderland and personally observed the terrain of Korea’s northwest and Manchuria. They strongly advocated for adopting Chinese carts as a means of transporting loads inside Korea and sharply criticized those at the Chosŏn court who asserted that wheeled vehicles were ill-suited to Korea’s mountainous terrain. By analyzing writings of Chosŏn scholars such as Kim Yuk and Pak Chega, this presentation will not only highlight the roles of the state that they saw in matters of infrastructure and transport. It will also assess the significance of historical memory, both in their formulation of proposals relating to infrastructure and transport and in the views of their opponents.
Speaker
Masato Hasegawa is an Assistant Professor of History at National Taiwan University, where he teaches courses in Korean, East Asian, and environmental history. He specializes in the history of technology and the environment in early modern East Asia, and his current research focuses on the intersections of bureaucratic knowledge, war mobilization, and ecology in the Sino-Korean borderland from the 16th to the 18th century.
Moderator
Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She is the Founding 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.
