With the start of a new year, GW officially launched the Institute 
for Korean Studies, thanks to the generosity of the Academy of Korean Studies. The Inaugural Ceremony was held on the 12th of January at the Elliott School of International Affairs. The George Washington University Emeritus Professor and GWIKS Senior Advisor Young-Key Kim-Renaud organized the all-day Inaugural Ceremony and Conference by securing funding through the National Endowment for the Humanities grant. Thanks to the support of Language Translation Institute of Korea, The Embassy of the Republic of Korea in the USA, Korea Foundation, and The Korean Literary Society of Washington, the event was held successfully. There were more than a hundred participants, far beyond the room capacity that joined to celebrate the establishment of GWIKS.
At the Inaugural Ceremony, special remarks were given by:
- GW President, Steven Knapp;
- Ambassador of the Republic of Korea, Ahn Ho-Young;
- President of the Academy of KoreanStudies, Ki-Dong Lee;
- Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William D. Adams;
- President of the Korea Foundation, Sihyung Lee;
- President of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, Seong-Kon Kim;
- Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs, Reuben E. Brigety;
- Dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Ben Vinson III;
- Senior Associate Provost for GW International Strategy, Douglas B. Shaw;
- Senior Advisor of the Institute for Korean Studies, Young-Key Kim-Renaud;
- Director of Institute for Korean Studies, Jisoo Kim;
- Interim Director of Institute for Korean Studies, Gregg A. Brazinsky.
The remarks by President of the Academy of Korean Studies, Ki-Dong Lee; President of the Korea Foundation, Sihyung Lee; the Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs, Reuben E. Brigety were read by proxy, by R. Richard Grinker, Seayoun Lee, and Edward McCord respectively.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony followed the special remarks, which officially indicated the opening of the brand new Institute for Korean Studies at GW.
In the afternoon there was an Inaugural Conference on Korean literature that met under the title, “Korean humanities and the Korean diaspora. Several well-known Korean scholars spoke at the conference, as listed below:
First Panel
- Wiebke Denecke, “Towards Comparative Studies of the Sinographic Sphere: The Poetics of Literary Beginnings in Korea and Japan”
- Young-Key Kim-Renaud, “Yongbiŏch’ŏn ka and the Korean Humanities”
- Sookja Cho, “Rhapsody for Humanity: Expanding Self and Space in the Borderlands of Seventeenth-Century Korean War Narratives”
- Michael J. Pettid, “Writing Women in Pre-modern Korea”
- Grace Koh, Commentary
Second Panel
- We Jung Yi, “Writing between Worlds: Choi In-hun and Alternative Globalities in Korean Literature”
- Christopher P. Hanscom, “The Return of the Real in Contemporary South Korean Fiction”
- Seong-Kon Kim, “The Spiritual Exile and (Post) Diasporic Identities of Korean American and Korean Writers: Don Lee and Han Kang”
- Moon Chung-hee, “The Future of the Korean Diaspora”
- James H. Mattson, Commentary
GWIKS thanks everyone who took their time to participate in the event to celebrate the opening of GWIKS with us! Big thanks to all the supporters for a successful event.
Link to GW Today News
Written by Ann Yang
GWIKS held its first Soh Jaipil Circle, a meeting to bring professionals together from the academic and think tank communities to engage in conversations related to Korean issues, on February 16th, 2017 at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies conference room. For our first meeting, we had the honor of having Dr. Daniel Roh, president and CEO of Asia Risk Monitor, Inc., as our first speaker. With his work and study experience in Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Korea, he is an expert in East Asian relations. He received his Ph.D. degree in the field of comparative political economy as a specialist in Japanese studies at MIT. In recent years, he has been interested in historical conflicts between Japan and Korea. As the current political turmoil between Japan and Korea heightens, his main talk explored the prospects of reconciliation between the two countries. He explained the history of main conflicts between Japan and Korea: Dokdo/Takeshima, comfort women, and post-war tensions. He shared his interesting prospects about the current issues between Japan and Korea to 30+ professors and students who gathered for the Soh Jaipil Circle meeting.
