Thursday, September 28
4:00-6:00 pm ET
909 Renaissance Park
Register here
This year’s Global Asian Studies Program annual speaker series theme will be Rethinking Korea: New Perspectives on a Critical Region.
This series invites distinguished scholars of culture, transnational history, environment, and international relations to offer novel perspectives on Korea while situating its complex place within global developments. We invite speakers to share their work that will not only shed light on the internal dynamics and rich history of Korea but also explore the complex relationship between this critical region and the larger world.
The Korean peninsula exerts an outsized influence on almost every facet of the world today. South Korea has emerged as one of the largest economies in the world, whose exports include everything from advanced technologies to popular culture. North Korea remains an authoritarian regime, whose efforts to challenge its international isolation threatens to ignite a global conflict. The peninsula is thus a critical engine of the global economy and a volatile flashpoint of geopolitical tensions. It is too important to be overlooked, let alone ignored.
The first lecture in the series, “Minor Cosmopolitanism: Korean-Language Transpacific Genre Fiction During the Interwar Period” will feature Dr. Yoon Sun Yang. Dr. 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.
