February 15, 22 & Mar 2

Series of Korean History Lectures

Prof. Leighanne Yuh
Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2017, 12:30 pm
“Strange Bedfellows? Confucian Traditions, Western-Style Learning, and the Evolution of Early Modern Korean Education, 1895-1910”

History Dept. Seminar Room
Sakamaki Hall A201

A comparison of textbook readers from 1895 and 1906 shows a shift from a state-centered narrative and a focus on the recruitment of “men of talent” to a focus on patriotism and civil duty for the preservation of national independence. Existing scholarship has interpreted the textbooks and corresponding education programs only in ways that promote nationalist agendas adhering to a linear model of progress and following a trajectory beginning with the Confucian tradition and arriving at Western enlightenment values. This study shows that the Confucian framework still operated as a bulwark and discursive system to help state officials and intellectuals absorb “Western” ideas; but this study also reveals how these patterns of integration played out in the realm of education. The categorizations of “Confucianism” and “Western learning” fit neatly into the slogan “Eastern Ways, Western Machines,” which was popular at the time in Korea, China, and Japan. However, this study problematizes the stark division between Western and Confucian systems, and instead explores the amalgamation of different influences. From a broadly defined Confucian framework emerged a particular form of civil morality that allowed intellectuals and government bureaucrats to discuss nationalism, citizenship, the public sphere, and other issues thought to be germane to a modern nation-state. Through the transformation of educational institutions, the discourses themselves evolved from those exclusively devoted to the production of competent bureaucrats to those that spoke to the broader public and engaged with this new civil morality.

Leighanne Yuh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Korean History at Korea University and Associate Editor of The International Journal of Korean History published by the Center for Korean Studies at Korea University. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on the Late Chosôn, early modern, and modern periods. Professor Yuh received her Ph.D. from the University of California in Los Angeles after completing her dissertation titled, “Education and the Struggle for Power in Korea, 1876-1910.”

Prof. C. Harrison Kim
Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017, 12:30 pm
“North Korea’s Vinalon City: Industrialism as Socialist Everyday Life”

History Dept. Seminar Room
Sakamaki Hall A201

In the early 1960s, the synthetic fiber vinalon became North Korea’s national fiber, a product that symbolized the independence and ingenuity of its state socialism, from the raw materials needed to make it (coal and limestone) to the person who invented it (the Japanese colonial-era chemist Ri Sŭnggi). The Vinalon Factory near Hamhŭng City—a factory originally built by a Japanese chemical company and a city rebuilt by East Germany—also became a national emblem. Vinalon City was a transnational object par excellence, but it was immutably localized as everyday narrative for the ordinary North Korean people, replete with its labor heroes who achieved superhuman levels of productivity. The everyday dimension is precisely where the ideological workings of state power are hidden. The history of vinalon reveals a characteristic of ideology of work—the subsumption of life by labor—a characteristic that is certainly not limited to North Korea.

Harrison Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Missouri. His research interests include everyday life, industrial work, socialism, and the modern city in the context of Korea and, in particular, North Korea. Harrison’s book, Furnace is Breathing: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, forthcoming from Columbia University Press, is about industrial work as a defining ideological activity in North Korea’s socialism after the Korean War and about the workers who lived during the demanding times of postwar reconstruction.

Prof. Henry Em
Thursday, March 2, 2017, 1:30 pm
“Until You Can Bite: Yun Ch’i-ho, Market Logic, and Liberalism in Colonial Korea”

History Dept. Seminar Room
Sakamaki Hall A201

How might we go about writing a critical history of liberalism in Korea, and how might that history be relevant to the (global) present? Focusing on Yun Ch’i-ho, a Christian reformist and government official prior to Korea’s annexation by Japan in 1910, Professor Em will argue that colonial-era liberals like Yun Ch’i-ho were complicit in creating a class alliance between the (colonial) state and propertied classes while also creating a society of competitive individuals. Basing his analyses on Yun Ch’i-ho’s Diary, he will examine several emergent aspects of liberalism in colonial Korea: economic thinking (market logic) and its dissemination into spheres of life and work; modes of feeling that endeavored to make certain ideas, values, and behavior normative; and reflexivity, via linguistic innovation, that objectified self and others for incessant evaluation and competition.

Henry Em is associate professor of Korean history at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. He received his B.A. and PhD (History, 1995) from the University of Chicago. From 1995 through 2012, he was assistant professor at UCLA and University of Michigan, and associate professor at NYU. He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to Korea (1998-1999) and Visiting Professor at Centre de Recherches sur la Corée, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2000). His recent publications include “Historians and History Writing in Modern Korea,” Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 5 (Oxford University Press, 2011), The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea (Duke University Press, 2013), and The Unending Korean War, a special issue of positions: asia critique co-edited with Christine Hong, 23:4 (Winter, 2015).