Category: Premodern Korea Lecture Series

“The Commodification of Chosŏn Ginseng and the Scale

of Environmental Change in Early Modern East Asia”

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

10:00 A.M – 11:30 A.M. EST

Virtual Event via Zoom

About the Event

Speaker

Wenjiao Cai is a historian of early modern Korea with research interests in environments, science and technology, law, and frontiers and borderlands. She is working on her first manuscript, Coping with the Cold: Nature and State on Chosŏn Korea’s Northern Frontier, which examines how human-climate relations shaped state expansion in Chosŏn’s northern provinces of P’yŏngan and Hamgyŏng. Wenjiao received her Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 2022 and currently serves as a Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Moderator

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017-Present) and Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-Present). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), 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 Criminalizing Intimacy: Marriage, Concubinage, and Illicit Sex in Chosŏn Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

“Warding Off Woes: Epidemic Talismans in Chosŏn Buddhism“

Thursday, February 22, 2024

10:00 A.M – 11:30 A.M. EST

Virtual Event via Zoom

About the Event

Speaker

Moderator

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017-Present) and Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-Present). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), 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 Criminalizing Intimacy: Marriage, Concubinage, and Illicit Sex in Chosŏn Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

“From Restricted Access to Published Archive: The Circulation of Official Histories of Koryŏ in Chosŏn (1392–1910)”

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

10:00 A.M – 11:30 A.M. EST

Zoom Event

About the Event

Speaker

Graeme Reynolds is a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern Korea with interests in the production and circulation of knowledge, the history of the book, and historiography. His book manuscript, Material Historiography: The Official Histories of Koryŏ from Their Compilation to the Present, examines the production, circulation, reception of two court histories treating the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392), the History of Koryŏ and the Essentials of Koryŏ History, from their contested compilation in the early Chosŏn period (1392–1910) to their effective canonization in a plethora of modern editions and databases in our digital present. Drawing on material bibliography, he has examined over one hundred call numbers of Chosŏn-era copies of the History and the Essentials held in institutions in Korea and Japan, and analyzed their physical features, track ownership marks and seals, and studied marginal notes left by readers to uncover the material history of these two historical works. His second project has been an investigation into Chosŏn Korea’s state-dominated and heavily non-commercial publishing economy, where woodblock, movable type, and handwriting were all viable methods of making books. He received his B.A. in Asian Area Studies from the University of British Columbia and holds an M.A. in Korean History from the Academy of Korean Studies and a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. Prior to coming to the University of Chicago, Reynolds was a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.

Moderator

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017-Present) and Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-Present). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), 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 Criminalization of Intimacy: Adultery Law and the Making of Monogamous Marriage in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

“Cartography and Contraband Religion in Chosŏn Korea: Andreas Kim Taegŏn (1821-1846) and his Map of Korea“

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

10:00 A.M – 11:30 A.M. EDT

Zoom Event

About the Event

Speaker

Pierre-Emmanuel Roux is an associate professor of East Asian history at Université Paris Cité. He is interested in the circulation of legal and religious knowledge in East Asia from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. He is the author of three monographs in French: La Croix, la baleine et le canon: La France face à la Corée au milieu du XIXe siècle [The Cross, the Whale, and the Cannon: French Policy towards Korea in the Mid Nineteenth Century] (Cerf, 2012), Les Enfers vivants ou La tragédie illustrée des coolies chinois à Cuba et au Pérou [The Living Hells or The Illustrated Tragedy of Chinese Coolies in Cuba and Peru] (Hémisphères, 2018), and Au tribunal du repentir : La proscription du catholicisme en Chine (1724-1860) [At the Tribunal of Repentance: The Prohibition of Catholicism in China, 1724-1860] (CNRS Editions, 2023). He also serves as the Chief Editor of the French scholarly journal Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident. He is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Andreas Kim Taegŏn (1821-1846): The Clandestine Life and Heroic Afterlife of the First Korean Catholic Priest.

Moderator

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017-Present) and Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-Present). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), 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 Criminalization of Intimacy: Adultery Law and the Making of Monogamous Marriage in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

“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

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.

“Kingdom of Pines: State Forestry and the Making of Korea, 1392-1910“

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

02:00 PM – 3:30 PM EDT

Zoom Event

About the Event

For almost every society before the twentieth century, the forest ecosystem was the main source of fuel, construction material, and raw chemical matter. In this presentation, Lee examines the longest continuous state forestry system in world history, that of Korea’s Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910). For five hundred years, the Chosŏn government managed forests across the Korean peninsula with focus on one type of conifer, the pine. Lee argues that state forestry was fundamental to the expansion of the Chosŏn state and its military, political, and cultural priorities from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Moreover, the government’s prioritization of pine profoundly transformed Korea’s environment. Over time however, Chosŏn forests also became contested zones as government policies clashed with administrative corruption, commercial operations, and the workaday sylvan needs of a growing populace. Overall, Lee offers a new, environmental-historical approach to Korean history that interweaves the making of state, society, and ecology on the Korean peninsula.

Speaker

John S. Lee is an environmental historian of early modern East Asia, particularly the Korean peninsula, with transregional interests in comparative histories of pre-industrial forestry; the history of pine; the premodern history of the conservationist state; and the long-term environmental legacies of Eurasian empires. He received his Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages in 2017 from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His current monograph project, Kingdom of Pines: State Forestry and the Making of Korea, 918-1910, examines the rise and fall of the longest continuous state forestry system in world history, that of Korea’s Chosŏn dynasty. His other current project examines the environmental legacies of the Mongol Empire in Asia, with a focus on the long-term impact of Inner Asian equine culture on the woodland and coastal zones of sedentary East Asia.

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.

“The Famous and the Nameless: The Lives and Afterlives of Chosŏn Catholic Martyrs”

Wednesday, September 28, 2022

2:00 PM – 3:30 PM EDT

Zoom Event

About the Event

The Chosŏn dynasty looms large in the history of Korean Catholicism. Korean Catholic saints are presented in visual media, from art to movies, as wearing imagined traditional Chosŏn dress in locations shot through with imagery from and references to the dynasty. And Korean Catholics need not travel abroad to go to holy sites, but can find plenty throughout their homeland, many of which are connected to the Chosŏn state and are celebrated by the local Korean government and by the Vatican and UNESCO as “international.” However, there is an awkwardness in such memories, as it was principally that Korean government that killed Catholics, who at the time were accused of subverting Confucian values, such as filial piety and the accompanying ancestor rites, that are celebrated by many Koreans today. And of course, from a contemporary nationalist perspective, Korean Catholics could in some cases be argued to be traitors who violated the laws of the nation and supported foreign imperialism. And even Korean Catholic martyrs against whom no such charges could be made still represent Koreans being killed by other Koreans, an uncomfortable memory, particularly considering the internecine conflict of the Korean War and ongoing division. This presentation will therefore ask “what is being remembered about these persecutions and how is it being remembered?” Through an exploration of the life of Saint Father Andrew Kim Taegŏn, the first Korean Catholic priest and recognized “patron” of UNESCO and his associated holy sites, and the history of Haemi Holy Site, which is celebrated as a place of “nameless” martyrs, this presentation will help us to better understand the realities of anti-Catholic persecution during the Chosŏn dynasty and how that history of religious persecution is being presented positively in a contemporary context by minimizing criticism of the Chosŏn people who were responsible for the persecutions, while exalting Korean Catholic martyrs as good subjects of the state, responsible members of society, and pioneers of the transition from the premodern to the modern.

Speaker

Franklin Rausch received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia and is an Associate Professor in the History and Philosophy Department at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina. His research focuses on Korean religious history, particularly Catholicism. He has published on such subjects as voluntary martyrdom, Fr. Emil Kapaun (an American Catholic chaplain who died in a POW camp during the Korean War), the Korean Catholic archives, and has contributed two articles on Korean Catholicism to The Palgrave Handbook of the Catholic Church in East Asia. His recent translation, carried out with Dr. Jieun Han, An Chunggŭn: His Life and Thought in His Own Words, was published by Brill in 2020, and has published an article comparing An Chunggŭn’s thought with that of American abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown. He is currently conducting work on Korean Catholic responses to Covid-19 and Korean Catholic historiography.

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.

“Inscribing the Realm: Early Silla Written Culture Through Mokkan”

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EDT

Zoom Event

About the Event

The early Korean kingdom of Silla (ca. third century CE-935 CE) began to use Sinographic writing widely in the mid-sixth century. This change appears to coincide with considerable territorial expansion under King Chinhǔng (r. 540-576), which included the annexation of territories formerly part of the Kaya confederacy and the conquest of the Han River Valley. While extant sources for this period are exceedingly few, inscriptions on stone steles and recently discovered mokkan (wooden strips with ink writing) suggest that the integration of new lands into the realm was accomplished at least in part through the use of writing. Mokkan inscriptions confirm the spread of document-based administration to mountain-fortress sites in outlying parts of the realm, while monumental inscriptions on stone steles appear to symbolically inscribe these new parts of the realm as belonging to the Silla king. This presentation will outline what we know of written culture in sixth and seventh century Silla through these inscriptions, and argue that writing was seen as a vital technology for bringing new territories and people under Silla control.

Speaker

Marjorie Burge received a B.A. in Asian Studies and Japanese from George Washington University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at UC Berkeley. From 2018-2019, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago. Her Ph.D. dissertation, “Inscriptive Life and Sinographic Literary Culture in Early Historic Korea and Japan,” examines inscribed wood slips known as mokkan excavated from sites in southern Korea and Japan in order to shed light on the nature of written culture in early historic Paekche (ca. third century-660 CE), Silla (ca. third century-935 CE) and Japan. The dissertation also attempts to answer questions related to the role of allochthons (Korean migrants) at the Japanese court in the development of written culture. Dr. Burge is currently working on revising her dissertation for publication as a book titled Unearthing the Written Cultures of Early Korea and Japan. In addition to this book project, Dr. Burge is currently working on two smaller projects, one on the late-ninth century waka-kanshi collection Shinsen Man’yōshū, and another on the literary culture of the court at the Ōmi capital (667-672).

Moderator

Jack Davey 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. At GW, he is also the Managing Editor of The Journal of Korean Studies where he seeks to foster interesting, interdisciplinary scholarship that challenges how we understand Korea as an analytic category. Dr. Davey received his Ph.D. in Archaeology from UCLA. He was a Korea Foundation postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley from 2014-2015 and a research fellow at the Academy of Korean Studies in 2018.

Did Ch’usa Kim Chŏnghŭi 秋史 金正喜 (1786-1856) Really Translate Xixiangji 西廂記 into Korean? Literary Fame, Manuscript Culture, and the Story of the Western Wing in Chosŏn Korea

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST

Zoom Event

The history of the reception of Xixiangji 西廂記, arguably China’s most popular dramatic work, in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1897) and into the Taehan Empire (1897-1905), Japanese protectorate (1905-1910) and colonial (1910-1945) periods, raises interesting questions about the intersection of literary fame and book culture. Numerous print editions were imported from China from the 17th century onwards, but because of its reputation as a ‘nether book’ 淫書 and unlike, say, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三國志演義, Xixiangji was never printed in Chosŏn. Instead, it was avidly consumed in lovingly produced annotated manuscript copies along with glossaries and commentaries.

This presentation examines the claim, first advanced in the 1970s by Professor Yi Kawŏn on the basis of a manuscript vernacular translation of Xixiangji then in his possession, that one of the Korean translations in wide circulation in late Chosŏn was executed by none other than famous late-Chosŏn polymath Kim Chŏnghŭi 金正喜 (1786-1856), whose numerous noms de plume and sobriquets include Wandang 阮堂 and Ch’usa 秋史.

An examination of this claim requires a survey of the history of the reception of the Xixiangji in Korea, as well as a consideration of the history of the image and reputation of Kim Chŏnghŭi, who was not lionized in modern scholarship until the late 1920s and 1930s. The facts adduced here also force us to reconsider the timing of the “Xixiangji boom,” which is usually alleged to have peaked in the last decade of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th century; they also compel us to rethink common modern-day assumptions about the withering of traditional reading practices and manuscript culture after the turn of the 20th century.

This event is on the record and open to the public.

Speaker

Moderator