Rethinking Korea: New Perspectives on a Critical Region | AY 23-24 Series Archive

Yoon Sun Yang is Associate Professor of Korean & Comparative Literature and of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Boston University. Her book From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Asia Center, 2017) won the James B. Palais Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2020. She is the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature (2020). Her second book project tentatively titled “Transpacific Palimpsests: Early Twentieth-Century Korean Migrant Literature between Two Empires” has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship and a Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities Fellowship.

Hajin Jun is the James B. Palais Assistant Professor of Korean History in the Department of History and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She specializes in the history of modern Korea, the Japanese empire, and Christianity in East Asia. Her current book project examines the politics of ritual reform in early twentieth-century Korea. She explores how marriage, funerary, and ancestral rites became heated sites of contestation as Protestant leaders, Korean cultural nationalists, and Japanese colonial officials sought to realize disparate visions for the Korean people, as well as for the proper place of religion in modern society.

Heesoo Kwon (b. 1990, Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. She earned a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Berkeley, and will start her position as an Assistant Professor in the Animation department at California College of the Arts in the Fall of 2023. Positioning herself as an artist, activist, archivist, anthropologist, and religious figure, Kwon builds feminist utopias in the digital realm that liberate one from personal, familial, and historical trauma rooted in patriarchy. Central to her practice and substantial bodies of work is Leymusoom, an autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017 as a form of personal resistance against misogyny and an ever-evolving framework for investigating her family histories. Kwon utilizes technologies such as digital archiving, 3D scanning, and animation as her ritualistic and shamanistic tools to regenerate her woman ancestors’ lives without constraints of time and space, and to queer her past, present, and utopian dreams.

Mr. Kim Jaehui has been the Consul General for the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Boston since June 2023. He has enjoyed a distinguished two-decade career in the Republic of Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, serving in Russia, Israel, the European Union, and many other diplomatic posts around the world. His service has been recognized by citations from the Prime Minister and the President. Mr. Kim is a graduate of Yonsei University, where he majored in Political Science and International Studies.

Eleana J. Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (Duke UP, 2022)and Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke UP, 2010), which was awarded the James B. Palais Prize from the Association of Asian Studies and the Social Sciences Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She also co-edited, with David Fedman and Albert Park, Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (Cornell UP, 2023). She is the current President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and serves on the editorial boards of Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Korean Studies, and Critical Asian Studies.  Dr. Kim’s talk, “De/Militarized Ecologies: Making Peace with Nature Along the Korean DMZ,” traces the entwined histories of military violence and postcolonial modernization in East Asia and their effects on local and global ecologies. In analyzing avian migratory flyways and other multispecies relations, Kim unpacks the material, political, and ecological entanglements of the Korean DMZ within processes of militarized liberal capitalism. Her framework of “biological peace” offers a critical vantage point for conceptualizing peace beyond human politics, in the context of climate crisis, perpetual war, and ongoing militarization of the planet. 

Gregg Brazinsky is Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University. His work focuses on US-East Asian relations during the Cold War. He is the author of two books: Nation Building in South Korea and Winning the The Third World. His op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and a number of other publications. He is currently working on two books: one covering Sino-North Korean relations and the other covering American relations with Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.