Thursday, February 18, 2021 3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time
Virtual Event via Zoom
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Speaker Douglas Gabriel, Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, GW Institute for Korean Studies
Moderator Immanuel Kim, Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies, the George Washington University
Soh Jaipil Lecture Series, State of Grace: The North Korean-Built Angkor Panorama Museum in Light of DPRK-Cambodian Cultural Relations
Event Description
Relatively little known, and yet readily visible in the form of its conspicuous façade situated along Siem Reap’s present-day tourist trail, the Angkor Panorama Museum stands as a curious component of Angkor Archeological Park. Designed and built by Mansudae Overseas Project, a branch of North Korea’s central art studio, the space opened in December 2015 only to shutter its doors less than four years later in November 2019. On at least one front the Angkor venture veered from Mansudae Overseas Projects’ representative work, a corpus that has to date consisted largely of socialist monuments commissioned by or gifted to African nations. With the Angkor Panorama Museum, Mansudae for the first time engaged with overtly religious subject matter, giving shape to a singular condensation of socialist realism and visual conventions associated with Hinduism and Buddhism.
This talk contextualizes the eccentricities of Mansudae’s Angkor project against the historical background of what amounted to an enduring friendship between Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) and Kim Il-sung (1912–1994). Exiled for prolonged periods throughout his life, Sihanouk spent substantial intervals at a palace Kim had ordered built for him outside of Pyongyang. There he produced music and poetry eulogizing North Korean–Khmer solidarity, and directed several films in the Korean language that featured all-Korean casts. This array of cultural artifacts anticipated the narrative arc of Mansudae’s Angkor museum by suggesting an unlikely convergence between the respectively secular-communist and religious ideological foundations of the North Korean and Cambodian states—one rooted in a proven resiliency against imperialist aggressors.
Speaker
Douglas Gabriel is a 2020-21 Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at GW. Douglas received his Ph.D. in art history from Northwestern University in 2019. His current book project, Over the Mountain: Realism Towards Reunification in Cold War Korea, 1980–1994, examines connections between the visual art of the minjung democratization movement in South Korea and the work of state-sponsored artists in North Korea. Previously, he was the 2019-20 Soon Young Kim Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Douglas’s research on North and South Korean art and architecture has appeared in the Journal of Korean Studies and Hyŏndae misulsa yŏngu [The Korean Journal of Contemporary Art History]. His work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Harvard Korea Institute, and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies.
Moderator
Immanuel Kim is Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies. Prior to working at the George Washington University, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). Dr. Kim received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. He is an authority on North Korean literature and film and is the author of a recent book on North Korean literature, Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction (University of Hawaii Press, 2018).
The GW Institute for Korean Studies and the Jeju Peace Institute Present:
Virtual Event A New Frontier of Cooperation: The Fight Against COVID-19
Friday, June 26, 2020
09:00 a.m. – 10:20 a.m. (EDT)
10:00 p.m. – 11:20 p.m. (KST)
Livestream via Zoom
Registered guests will receive following Eventbrite confirmation email with details for joining the Zoom virtual event.
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Event Description
The United States and South Korea, allies since the Korean War, are in the fight against the newly emerged foe of COVID-19 together. They are sharing information on containing the coronavirus and cooperating on procuring COVID test kits. In a historic reversal of role, South Korea, the recipient of the U.S. aid during the Korean War, also donated protective masks to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in honor of its 70th anniversary. Moving forward to the next stages of reopening, Seoul and Washington could continue exploring the new frontier of cooperation in the public health sector. Please join GW Institute for Korean Studies and Jeju Peace Institute for an online discussion by both South Korean and American journalists on the areas where the two allies could cooperate in the coronavirus era.
Speakers
Hyunju Park, Staff Reporter, JTBC
Hyunju Park (left) is a news reporter at JTBC broadcasting company in South Korea. She started her career at JTBC in January 2015 and worked as a foreign affairs correspondent for 3 years. She got a chance to cover both the first and second U.S.-North Korea summits, reporting live from Singapore and Hanoi, Vietnam. Currently she is working for a global news division of JTBC.
Laeticia Ock, Staff Reporter, The Korea Herald
Laeticia Ock (right) has worked as a staff reporter for The Korea Herald since 2014. Throughout her career in journalism, she has covered social affairs in South Korea ranging from the Sewol ferry disaster and the candlelight movement that led to President Park Geun-hye’s ouster, to Korea’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She was also a correspondent at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2018, covering a diplomacy involving the two Koreas and the US. She holds bachelor’s degrees in political science and diplomacy, as well as English Interpretation & Translation from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
Discussants
Sang-Hun Choe, Seoul Bureau Chief, The New York Times
Sang-Hun Choe is the Seoul bureau chief for The New York Times, focusing on news on North and South Korea. He worked for The Associated Press for 11 years before joining The Times in 2005. He has won journalism awards for his reports on Korea and Myanmar, including a 2000 Pulitzer Prize. He is a co-author of two books on Korea and co-editor of another two, also on Korea.
Anthony Kuhn, Seoul Correspondent, NPR
Anthony Kuhn is NPR’s correspondent based in Seoul, South Korea, reporting on the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Before moving to Seoul in 2018, he traveled to the region to cover major stories including the North Korean nuclear crisis and the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster. Kuhn previously served two five-year stints in Beijing, China, for NPR, focusing in particular on China’s rich traditional culture and its impact on the current day. From 2010-2013, Kuhn was NPR’s Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta, Indonesia, and also served as NPR’s correspondent in London from 2004-2005, Prior to joining NPR, Kuhn wrote for the Far Eastern Economic Review and freelanced for various news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. He majored in French literature as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, and later did graduate work at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American studies in Nanjing.
Moderator
Yonho Kim, Associate Director, GW Institute for Korean Studies
Yonho Kim is Associate Research Professor of Practice and Associate Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. He specializes in North Korea’s mobile telecommunications and U.S. policy towards North Korea. Kim is the author of North Korea’s Mobile Telecommunications and Private Transportation Services in the Kim Jong-un Era (2019) and Cell Phones in North Korea: Has North Korea Entered the Telecommunications Revolution? (2014). His research findings were covered by various media outlets, including Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Yonhap News, and Libération. Prior to joining GWIKS, he extensively interacted with the Washington policy circle on the Korean peninsula as Senior Researcher of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Senior Reporter for Voice of America’s Korean Service, and Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council’s Program on Korea in Transition. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in International Relations from Seoul National University, and an M.A. in International Relations and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
(Image Credit: U.S. Embassy in the Republic of Korea)
The GW Institute for Korean Studies and the Jeju Peace Institute Present:
Virtual Event
Challenges of Reopening:
South Korea’s COVID-19 Experience
Thursday, June 18, 2020
09:00 a.m. – 10:20 a.m. (EDT)
10:00 p.m. – 11:20 p.m. (KST)
Livestream via Zoom
Registered guests will receive following Eventbrite confirmation email with details for joining the Zoom virtual event.
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Event Description
As the U.S. is aiming at the next stages of reopening, the South Korean case would provide a rare example of a new normal in the coronavirus era, instituting both social distancing and other preventative measures. South Korea has led the world’s efforts to move toward the initial phases of reopening, after emerging as a successful model of flattening the curve of COVID-19. South Korea officially loosened social distancing guidelines and shifted to a more relaxed ‘distancing in daily life’ by reopening schools, museums, libraries, and resuming professional baseball and soccer leagues. However, the South Korean case also shows that reopening is still an enormously complicated and challenging task while the virus is still spreading. New clusters of the coronavirus have been identified and many schools were closed just a few days after reopening. In addition, the social costs and vulnerable workforce revealed in the pandemic era will have to be taken care of. Please join GW Institute for Korean Studies and Jeju Peace Institute for an online discussion by both South Korean and American journalists on South Korea’s experience in reopening in the coronavirus era.
Speakers
Sarah Kim, Staff Reporter, Korea JoongAng Daily
Sarah Kim (left) is a reporter on the National Desk of the Korea JoongAng Daily, published with the New York Times International Edition. She specializes in foreign affairs and security issues at the paper but also has covered health, education, and social affairs. She is the recipient of the 2019 Foreign Language Newspapers Association of Korea (FNA) award for journalists. Kim has appeared on radio programs including TBS, Arirang, KBS World, and BBC. She organized and cohosted the 2018 Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity’s Ambassadors’ Round Table session. She previously has worked as an English language instructor in Seoul and a legal assistant in New York. Kim holds a bachelor’s degree in History and English from Middlebury College.
Victoria Kim, Seoul Correspondent, L.A. Times
Victoria Kim (right) is the Seoul correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the paper in 2007, she has covered state and federal courts, worked on investigative projects, and reported on Southern California’s Korean community. She has previously written for the Associated Press out of South Korea and West Africa, as well as for the Financial Times in New York. Kim was raised in Seoul and graduated from Harvard University with a degree in history.
Discussants
Seung Min Kim, White House Correspondent, The Washington Post
Seung Min Kim (left) is a White House reporter for The Washington Post, covering the Trump administration through the lens of Capitol Hill. Before joining The Washington Post in 2018, she spent more than eight years at Politico, primarily covering the Senate and immigration policy. Kim is also an on-air political analyst for CNN.
Timothy Martin, Seoul Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal
Tim Martin (right) is the Korea bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, where he oversees news coverage on the Korean Peninsula. He has been based in Seoul since early 2017, with prior stints at the Journal’s offices in New York, Chicago and Atlanta—where he covered public health and the CDC.
Moderator
Jisoo M. Kim, Director, GW Institute for Korean Studies
Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures and Director of the Institute for Korean Studies at GW. She received her Ph.D. in Korean History from Columbia University. She is a specialist in gender and legal history of early modern Korea. 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 two book projects titled Suspicious Deaths: Forensic Medicine, Dead Bodies, and Criminal Justice in Chosŏn Korea and Sexual Desire and Gendered Subjects: Decriminalization of Adultery Law in Korean History.
The GW Institute for Korean Studies and the East Asia National Resource Center Present:
Korea Policy Forum
Post-Pandemic U.S.-South Korea Economic Cooperation
Monday, June 29, 2020 | 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. EDT
Livestream via WebEx
Registered guests will receive the following confirmation email with details for joining the WebEx event.
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Event Description
The COVID-19 pandemic imposed unprecedented economic challenges to both the U.S. and South Korea. However, Seoul and Washington have put into place a framework for fruitful economic partnerships that are delivering measurable, concrete benefits for Americans and Koreans alike. The two allies have fought common foes in the past; the same determination and cooperation is required to defeat COVID-19. South Korea’s institutional capacity to handle the current pandemic shows exactly why it is important for Washington to enhance its already strong partnership with Seoul. The United States and South Korea have much to offer to each other, and much to gain from their ever-evolving practical partnership on many key economic policy fronts.
Please join GW Institute for Korean Studies for a timely online discussion on strategic methods in which Washington and Seoul can broaden cooperation even further and invigorate the practical partnership between the two proven allies in pursuit of economic rebound in this time of uncertainty.
Speaker Terry Miller ,Director of Center for International Trade and Economics and Mark A. Kolokotrones Fellow in Economic Freedom, The Heritage Foundation
Terry Miller champions free markets as director of two of The Heritage Foundation’s key research centers, Data Analysis and Trade and Economics, and as the think tank’s Mark A. Kolokotrones fellow in economic freedom. At the Center for Trade and Economics, Miller focuses on research into how free markets and international trade foster economic growth around the world. He is editor of a signature Heritage publication, the annual Index of Economic Freedom. At the Center for Data Analysis, Miller oversees the statistical and econometric modeling that underpins the think tank’s wide-ranging research programs. Both centers are part of Heritage’s Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity. Before joining Heritage in 2007 as director of the Center for Trade and Economics, Miller had a distinguished career in the U.S. Foreign Service. In 2006, he was appointed as an ambassador to the United Nations and U.S. representative on the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council. Miller previously served at the State Department as deputy assistant secretary for economic and global issues. He headed offices at State devoted to the promotion of human rights, social issues, development and trade. Overseas, Miller served in Italy, France, Barbados and New Zealand. He headed the U.S. observer mission to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Miller did both his undergraduate studies in government and his graduate studies in economics at the University of Texas in Austin. He and his wife, the former opera singer Deborah Miller, have three children.
Discussant Wonhyuk Lim, Professor, KDI School of Public Policy and Management
Wonhyuk Lim is a professor at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management. He is a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS in 2020. Since he joined KDI in 1996, his research has focused on state-owned enterprises and family-based business groups (chaebol). He has also written extensively on development issues, in conjunction with policy consultation projects under Korea’s Knowledge Sharing Program (KSP). After the 2002 Presidential Election in Korea, he worked for the Presidential Transition Committee and the Presidential Committee on Northeast Asia and helped to set policy directions for the restructuring of the electricity and gas sector and for Northeast Asian energy cooperation. Dr. Lim was at the Brookings Institution as a CNAPS Fellow in 2005-06. After returning to KDI in 2007, he became Director of the Office of Economic Development Cooperation, precursor to the Center for International Development (CID). He received a Presidential order from the Dominican Republic for his KSP consultation work. In 2010, Dr. Lim helped to formulate the G20 Seoul Development Consensus for Shared Growth. In 2013, he became Vice President and Director of Department of Competition Policy at KDI. In 2014-15, he served as the inaugural Executive Director of the Center for Regulatory Studies. Most recently, he served as Associate Dean, Office of Development Research and International Cooperation, at KDI School. His recent publications include Opinion Polarization in Korea: Its Characteristics and Drivers (KDI, 2019, co-authored), Understanding the Drivers of Trust in Government Institutions in Korea (OECD, 2018, co-edited), Improving Regulatory Governance (OECD, 2017, co-authored), The Korean Economy: From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future (Harvard, 2015, co-authored), and Global Leadership in Transition: Making the G20 More Effective and Responsive (Brookings and KDI, 2011, co-edited). He received a B.A.S. in Physics and History and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.
Moderator
Yonho Kim Associate Director, GW Institute for Korean Studies
Yonho Kim is Associate Research Professor of Practice and Associate Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. He specializes in North Korea’s mobile telecommunications and U.S. policy towards North Korea. Kim is the author of North Korea’s Mobile Telecommunications and Private Transportation Services in the Kim Jong-un Era (2019) and Cell Phones in North Korea: Has North Korea Entered the Telecommunications Revolution? (2014). His research findings were covered by various media outlets, including Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Yonhap News, and Libération. Prior to joining GWIKS, he extensively interacted with the Washington policy circle on the Korean peninsula as Senior Researcher of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Senior Reporter for Voice of America’s Korean Service, and Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council’s Program on Korea in Transition. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in International Relations from Seoul National University, and an M.A. in International Relations and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
The Korea Policy Forum is made possible by a generous grant provided by the KDI School of Public Policy and Management.
Si Nae Park, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
Moderator
Jisoo Kim, Director, GW Institute for Korean Studies; Co-Director, East Asia NRC
Date & Time
Thursday, March 11, 2021 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time
Virtual Event
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Win a bookgiveaway! We will send one copy of the book to one of the guests who submit their questions during the event!
Event Description
In this presentation, Si Nae Park introduces her book The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (Columbia University, 2020), the first book in the English language on the late Chosŏn literary genre of yadam. The presentation has two components. First, Park highlights key points of her book: how the culture of eighteenth-century Seoul as the political, economic, and cultural center of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) gave rise to a new vernacular narrative form that was evocative of the spoken and written Korean language of the time, and how yadam narratives spread in the late Chosŏn culture of texts. Next, Park discusses the book’s implication as a research project that extricates the genre of yadam from the nation-centered literary historiography (kungmunhak) of the 20th century, and puts forward a need to consider vernacular eloquence beyond the Korean script and script-focused linguistic nationalism.
Speaker
Si Nae Park is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. She studies the literature, culture of texts, history of writing and reading, and linguistic thought of Korea within the larger context of the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Park’s research specializes in the role of linguistic sensibilities in perception, conceptualization, production and diffusion of literature, literary historiography, and canon formation. Currently, Park is working on her second monograph to examine the impact of aurality on literature with a focus on Chosŏn vernacular novels (ŏnmun sosŏl) as vocalized books. Her first book, The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (Columbia University, 2020), explores the rise of the vernacular story genre (yadam) in sinographic writing, challenging the script (han’gŭl)-focused approach to 20th-century Korean language and literature. Park the co-editor of Score One for the Dancing Girl and Other Stories from the ‘Kimun ch’onghwa’: A Story Collection from Nineteenth-Century Korea (University of Toronto Press, 2016).
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.
Panel Discussion: Korean Cultural Influence in Southeast Asia
Speakers: Kamon Butsaban, Duy Tan La, Hiền Nguyễn Thị
Discussant: Gregg A. Brazinsky
Moderator: Shawn McHale
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
9:00 PM – 11:00 PM EDT
Virtual Event
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Event Description
South Korea’s soft power and cultural influence have become increasingly significant in Southeast Asia during the last two decades. This panel features three eminent Korea experts from Thailand and Vietnam. They will discuss the changing relations between South Korea and Southeast Asia and the way that Vietnamese, Thai, and other Southeast Asians have contributed to South Korea’s growing economic and cultural ties with the region. Professor Shawn McHale, a leading US historian of Vietnamese history will provide commentary.
Speaker
Kamon Butsaban is currently a faculty member in the Faculty of Arts at Chulalongkorn University. He serves as the Head of the Korean section and the Secretary of M.A. Korean Studies Program at the Graduate School at Chulalongkorn University. His fields of research lie in Korean Studies, with particular interests in Korean society and culture. It examines several related themes: Korea’s soft power, Korean wave (Hallyu), and the New Southern Policy, and Thailand-Korea cultural cooperation. Dr. Butsaban received his Ph.D. in international studies from Seoul National University and his M.A. in Korean Studies from Chulalongkorn University and B.A. in Political Science from Prince of Songkla University, Thailand.
Duy Tan La is a full-time lecturer at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities-Vietnam National University (USSH-VNU), Ho Chi Minh city. Graduated from USSH-VNU with a major in Oriental studies, he continued his higher education in South Korea (2010-2018) with a focus on modern Korean history and culture at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS). He is currently teaching Korean language, courses of “Introduction to Korean history”, and “History of Korean social life” to undergraduate students in the Faculty of Korean Studies, USSH-VNU. His research interest is about Korean and Vietnamese history in comparative perspectives, history of Korea and Vietnam’s relations, issues about North East Asia’s security related to North Korea, etc. He is a young and ambitious scholar in the field of Korean studies who put his faiths and efforts into the development of Korean studies in Vietnam, always looking forward to presenting Vietnam and Korea altogether to the world via international connectedness and scholarly cooperation.
Hiền Nguyễn Thị is a Professor of Korean Studies at the Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City. She is the Editor-in-chief of the Vietnamese Localization of Koreana the quarterly webzine magazine on Korean arts and culture She is the author of Shanghai – Tokyo – Ha Noi – Seoul in East Asian Literature at the beginning of 20th century (2017), and has translated and published a number of books from Korean to Vietnamese, including 20 Years of Korea – Viet Nam’ Relationship (1992 -2002) (2015), An Anthology of Korean Literature (2017), amongst others. She received a Ph.D. in Korean Literature from Seoul National University.
Discussant
Shawn McHale teaches courses on Southeast Asian history, Vietnam, history and memory, and colonialism and its legacy. His book, The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945-56, will be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2021. He spent most of 2019 in Cambodia and Vietnam on an ACLS/ Robert Ho Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, working on a new project on Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist engagements with Theravada Buddhism, 1930-1990.
Moderator
Gregg A. Brazinsky is Professor of History and International Affairs and Deputy Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. His research seeks to understand the diverse and multi-faceted interactions among East Asian states and between Asia and the United States. He is the author of Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). He served as Interim Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies during the Spring 2017 semester.
Korea Policy Forum: U.S.-ROK-Japan Trilateral Relations
in the Biden Era
Speakers: Gregg A. Brazinsky, Shihoko Goto, Seong-ho Sheen
Moderator: Celeste Arrington
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EDT
Virtual Event
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Event Description
The Biden administration has made it clear that it is committed to re-energizing American alliances in Northeast Asia. At the same time, relations between South Korea and Japan are still strained over legal and economic disputes. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin are to make their first international trip to Japan and South Korea later this month. Responding to the Biden administration’s clear signals toward multilateral engagement, South Korean President Moon Jae-in recently invited Japan to renew efforts to mend ROK-Japan bilateral relations. Please join the GW Institute for Korean Studies for an online discussion with experts who will be discussing views from the United States, South Korea, and Japan on reinvigorating trilateral cooperation.
Speakers
Gregg A. Brazinsky is Professor of History and International Affairs and Deputy Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. His research seeks to understand the diverse and multi-faceted interactions among East Asian states and between Asia and the United States. He is the author of Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). He served as Interim Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies during the Spring 2017 semester.
Shihoko Goto is the Deputy Director for Geoeonomics and Senior Northeast Asia Associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program. She specializes in trade relations and economic issues across Asia, and is also focused on developments in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. She is also a contributing editor to The Globalist, and a fellow of the Mansfield Foundation/Japan Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future for 2014 to 2016. Prior to joining the Wilson Center, she spent over ten years as a journalist writing about the international political economy with an emphasis on Asian markets. As a correspondent for Dow Jones News Service and United Press International based in Tokyo and Washington, she has reported extensively on policies impacting the global financial system as well as international trade. She currently provides analysis for a number of media organizations. She was also formerly a donor country relations officer at the World Bank. She received the Freeman Foundation’s Jefferson journalism fellowship at the East-West Center and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s journalism fellowship for the Salzburg Global Seminar. She is fluent in Japanese and French. She received an M.A. in international political theory from the Graduate School of Political Science, Waseda University, Japan, and a B.A. in Modern History, from Trinity College, University of Oxford, UK.
Seong-ho Sheen is Professor of International Security, and Director of International Security Center at Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS), Seoul National University (SNU). Previously, he was a visiting fellow at the East-West Center DC, a CNAPS fellow at the Brookings Institution, an assistant research professor at Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS) and a research fellow at Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA). He has taught at University of Massachusetts Boston. In addition, he advised various government organizations including ROK National Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Unification, and the ROK National Assembly. His area of interest includes International Security, US Foreign Policy, Northeast Asian Politics and the Korean Peninsula. Professor Sheen received Ph.D. and M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University and B.A. from Seoul National University.
Moderator
Celeste Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at GW. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research and teaching focus on law and social movements, the media, lawyers, policy processes, historical justice, North Korean human rights, and qualitative methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism. She is the author of Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (2016) and has published in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, and the Washington Post, among others. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. from Princeton University. She is currently writing a book that analyzes the role of lawyers and legal activism in Japanese and Korean policies related to persons with disabilities and tobacco control.
Moderator Jisoo M. Kim, GW Institute for Korean Studies
Monday, March 29, 2021 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.Eastern Time
Virtual Event via Zoom
This event is on the record and open to the public.
Win a book giveaway! We will send one copy of the book to one of the guests who submit their questions during the event!
Event Description
Early in the seventeenth century, Northeast Asian politics hung in a delicate balance among the Chosŏn dynasty in Korea, the Ming in China, and the Manchu. When a Chosŏn faction realigned Korea with the Ming, the Manchu attacked in 1627 and again a decade later, shattering the Chosŏn-Ming alliance and forcing Korea to support the newly founded Qing dynasty. Chronicling the dramatic Korean resistance to the attack, the scholar-official Na Man’gap (1592–1642) recorded the second Manchu assault in his Diary of 1636 (Pyŏngjarok). Partly composed as a narrative of the siege of Namhan Mountain Fortress, where Na sought refuge with the king and other officials, the diary recounts Korean opposition to Manchu and Mongol forces and the eventual surrender. Based on his new book The Diary of 1636: The Second Manchu Invasion of Korea (Columbia University Press, 2020), George Kallander will discuss the Korean response to the Manchu attacks and the relevance of the diary to readers in Chosŏn and contemporary times.
Speaker
George Kallander(left) is associate professor of history at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he is director of the East Asia Program at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. His research focuses on early modern Korea. He is author of two books The Diary of 1636: The Second Manchu Invasion of Korea (Columbia University Press, 2020) and Salvation through Dissent: Tonghak Heterodoxy and Early Modern Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013). He is co-editors of the Cambridge History of Korea project, the Chosŏn Dynasty volume, for which he is also contributing a chapter. He is also completing a new monograph tentatively titled Beastly Rites: Human-Animal Relations and the Hunt in Premodern Korea. Professor Kallander has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Academy of Korean Studies, and Columbia University.
Moderator
Jisoo M. Kim (right) 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.
the George Washington University & Indiana University
Friday, April 2, 2021 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. (EDT) Livestream via Zoom
This event is open to the public.
Event Description
The 2021 GW-IU Korean Literature Essay Contest Ceremony will be held Friday, April 2, at 7:00 pm EDT. Join us as Faculty and Staff from both the George Washington University and Indiana University announce the winners of the essay contest after opening remarks from special guest speaker, Jamie Chang, Literary Translator of this year’s book, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo. This event will be open to all participants and extended to the general public to attend.
Guest Speaker
Jamie Chang is a literary translator based in Seoul, who teaches at Ewha Woman’s University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Translation Academy at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Her works include Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, The Great Soul of Siberia by Park Sooyong, and The Summer by Choi Eunyoung.
Judges
You-me Park (Left) is a teaching professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. Park has taught a class supported through the Berkley Center’s Doyle Seminars project. Before coming to Georgetown in 2004, she taught at George Washington University and Bryn Mawr College. You-Me Park co-edited Postcolonial Jane Austen (2000) and a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on US Neoimperialism (2004). Her articles have appeared in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Pre/Text, Interventions, Restoration, and American Literature, as well as in various anthologies and edited volumes. She is presently completing a book-length study titled War on Women: Militarism, Gender, and Human Rights, which rethinks the connections among militaristic ideology, human rights discourse, and contemporary theories of biopolitics and sexual violence. Park holds a B.A. and M.A. from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. from George Washington University.
Susan Hwang (Center) is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Culture at Indiana University. She specializes in contemporary Korean literature and culture, with broader scholarly interest in intellectual history in East Asia, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, translation studies, and theories of world literature. Her current project examines the shifting relationship between literature and dissident politics in South Korea from the 1960s to the present. In this project she tells the story of how writers, critics, and intellectuals emerged as political actors at crucial junctures in South Korea’s recent history. In her teaching, she draws extensively from her training in intertextuality, theory and practice of translation, and transnationalism in East Asia. While promoting comparative and critical engagement with diverse cultural forms (literature, film, digital media, etc.), she emphasizes the importance of examining the politics of medium and storytelling that shape Korea’s cultural and textual history.
Jonathan Kief (Right) is an Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina. He is a scholar of modern Korean and comparative literature specializing in North and South Korean fiction and criticism of the mid-twentieth century. His research interests include global and regional histories of Cold War culture, colonial and postcolonial Korean-Japanese literary and intellectual exchanges, translation studies, the Korean diaspora, and interactions between texts, images, and broadcast sound. He is currently working on a manuscript titled “Toward the Round Horizon”: Cross-Border Reading and Writing in the Cold War Koreas, which explores interactions between North and South Korean literature within broader transnational networks of the 1950s and 1960s.
In this webinar, co-editors Celeste Arrington and Patricia Goedde will introduce their new book Rights Claiming in South Korea (published by Cambridge University Press) with fellow chapter contributor Erin Chung (Johns Hopkins University). Sociologists Paul Chang (Harvard) and Hae Yeon Choo (University of Toronto) will discuss the edited volume’s findings and contributions to our understanding of rights-based activism in contemporary South Korea.
People in South Korea have defined and articulated diverse grievances as rights violations and engaged in claims-making to remedy them. In what institutional contexts does such rights claiming occur, and what sources of support are available for utilizing different claims-making channels? This edited volume illuminates rights in action by investigating how rights are interpreted and acted upon via petitions, court claims, protest, and other legal mobilization methods. Our research shows that rights claims are diversifying in Korea and opportunities and resources for rights claiming have improved. But obtaining rights protections and catalyzing social change remains challenging. Contributors from across the social sciences analyzed original interviews, court rulings and statutes, primary sources in archives and online, and news media coverage in Korean. The chapters uncover conflicts over contending rights claims, expose disparities between law on the books and law in practice, trace interconnections among rights and movements, and map emerging trends in the use of rights language. Case studies include women, workers, people with disabilities, migrants, and sexual minorities.
Since the book launch will be conducted virtually, most of the volume’s contributors will join the discussion from three continents.
Speakers
Celeste Arrington (left) is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research and teaching focus on law and social movements, the media, lawyers, policy processes, historical justice, North Korean human rights, and qualitative methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism. She is the author of Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (2016) and has published in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, and the Washington Post, among others. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. from Princeton University. She is currently writing a book that analyzes the role of lawyers and legal activism in Japanese and Korean policies related to persons with disabilities and tobacco control.
Patricia Goedde (center) is a Professor at Sungkyunkwan University, School of Law, where she was also appointed Associate Dean of Academic Affairs (2016-2018). Dr. Goedde received a JD and PhD in Asian and Comparative Law from the University of Washington, School of Law. She is a member of the Washington State Bar Association, a board member of the Korea Human Rights Foundation, as well as a core faculty member of the Social Sciences Korea (SSK) Human Rights Forum. Dr. Goedde’s teaching and research subjects are in the areas of East Asian comparative law, international human rights law, public interest lawyering, transnational legal mobilization, clinical legal education, and North Korean legal studies.
Erin Aeran Chung(right) is the Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She previously served as the director of the East Asian Studies Program and the co-director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC) Program. She specializes in East Asian political economy, international migration, and comparative racial politics. She has been a Mansfield Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future Program Scholar, an SSRC Abe Fellow at the University of Tokyo and Korea University, an advanced research fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, and a Japan Foundation fellow at Saitama University. She also served on the Executive Committee of the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association and is currently co-editor of the Politics and Society of East Asia Elements series at Cambridge University Press. She is the author of Immigration and Citizenship in Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Japanese translation published by Akashi Shoten, 2012) and Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She was recently awarded a five-year grant from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) to support the completion of her third book project on Citizenship, Social Capital, and Racial Politics in the Korean Diaspora.
Discussants
Hae Yeon Choo (left) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2016), a comparative study of three groups of Filipina women in South Korea: factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and hostesses at American military camp town clubs. Her research on gender, intersectionality, citizenship, and urban sociology has appeared in Gender & Society, Sociological Theory, positions: asia critique, Urban Studies, and Sexualities. Her current book project examines social activism in contemporary South Korea as sites of emergent critical social theory and new political imagination. She has also translated Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought into Korean.
Paul Y. Chang (right) is an associate professor of sociology at Harvard University and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Sociology and the Director of Undergraduate Student Programs at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He was the 2019-2020 Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970-1979 (Stanford University Press 2015) and co-editor of South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (Routledge 2011). His research on social movements, state repression, and Korean society has appeared in several disciplinary and area studies journals. His current project explores the emergence of non-traditional family structures in South Korea, including single-parent households, single-person households, and multicultural families.
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..
