A review of the Harvard Yenching Library Rare Books Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA. The Harvard-Yenching Library holds more than 1.3 million volumes. This review won’t bore readers with the details of each collection, which are introduced on the library’s website. Instead, my aim is to convince the reader to consider a visit to the library and its world-class rare book collection. Although most of the library’s holdings are listed in fully searchable catalogs, there are many discoveries awaiting even cursory exploration. Our persisting ignorance of the Harvard-Yenching...

A review of The Furnace is Breathing: Work and the Everyday Life in North Korea, 1953-1961, by Cheehyung Kim. In February 2013, North Korea carried out its third nuclear test, following the successful launch of the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3 Unit 2 satellite the previous year. Many observers in the Western world – including its sibling state in the south – proposed various theories to make sense of how the most secluded and isolated country in the world, with an oppressive regime allegedly hated by most of its own people, could manage to complete such sophisticated technological projects. The...

A review of Virtuous Citizens and Sentimental Society: Ethics and Politics in Neoliberal South Korea, by EuyRyung Jun. This concise dissertation focuses on the activities of NGOs and the Korean state concerning foreign migrants and thereby addresses the shifting and ambiguous relationship between the nation-state and civil society in contemporary South Korea. It uses archival and ethnographic data to analyze how the growing presence of foreign migrants, including workers and brides, has generated moral and ethical concerns about Korean society among the state and civil society organizations,...

A review of Divergent Visions of Serving the Great: The Emergence of Chosŏn-Qing Tributary Relations as a Politics of Representation, by Joshua Van Lieu. In this fascinating dissertation, Joshua Van Lieu examines the international ritual protocol between Chosŏn dynasty Korea and Qing dynasty China in the late-nineteenth century. Basing his study on close readings of Korean and Chinese sources, he argues that the larger geopolitical realities of Northeast Asia, mainly the impact of Western and Japanese imperialism, compelled Qing and Chosŏn officials to rethink not only the form but also the...

A review of Screening the Past: Historiography of Contemporary South Korean Cinema, 1998-2008 by Young Eun Chae. The dissertation focused on Korean cinema from 1998-2008 by framing it under three historically significant events in contemporary Korea – the Japanese occupation and colonization, the Korean War and the Gwangju Democratization Movement. All these events which unfolded in the Korean archipelago have been revisited cinematically by Korean filmmakers in an attempt to reinforce, re-tell and provide alternative readings of past upheavals through the medium of feature-length films. Young...

A review of Gender, Justice and the Geopolitics of Undocumented North Korean Migration, by Eunyoung Choi. Most reports on North Korean defectors tell the story of a victimized people, downtrodden by a terrible regime who search for a better life, only to be exploited again in China. Eunyoung Choi’s Gender, Justice, and Geopolitics of Undocumented North Korean Migration offers a different version of this now familiar story. The tale begins in a similar fashion: undocumented North Korean migrants face great odds to cross the border in search of survival. Arriving in China, they fall to prey...

Online Resources for Koreanists 2.0 Compiled by Amy Levine (Visiting Professor, Changwon National University) South Korea has the highest percentage in the world of its population regularly using a high-speed internet connection.  Living, working, and researching in and/or about Korea means being online and being fast.  One does not have to spend long talking about or being in the country before hearing or saying, “빨리 빨리 (p’alli p’alli, quickly quickly).” Although a cliché, quick and online are notable features — for better and worse — of the research context in...

A review of the National Assembly Library (NAL), Seoul, Republic of Korea. A place that I return to frequently in Seoul is the National Assembly Library (NAL). The NAL is a good first stop for secondary sources and supplementary materials. Since the NAL is open to the public, it is a good destination if one is in Seoul on a short trip without an institutional home, a frequent problem in South Korea. Collection. To use the NAL, it is best to first familiarize yourself with the online search engine and database, which can be found at www.nanet.go.kr. (Until recently the site functioned only on...

A review of From Bewitching Beauty to Effete King: Transgendering of King Peony in Medieval Chinese and Korean Literature, by Jeongsoo Shin. The peony has come to have a variety of associations in the East Asian literary tradition. Its luxurious petals have signaled wealth and beauty while its peculiar, seedless manner of reproduction has come to symbolize sterility and empty luxury. It has even come to represent political power as a symbol of China as a nation, arguably one of its dominant associations today. In his fascinating account of the peony’s literary history, From Bewitching Beauty...

A review of The Hope and Crisis of Pragmatic Transition: Politics, Law, Anthropology and South Korea, by Amy Beth Levine. Anthropologists don’t always talk about method, but when they do, “pragmatism” often names its character. At the same time, in recent decades “pragmatism” has been a transnationally-resonant political commitment, or at least claim. Its mantle has been assumed by everyone from Blair-Clinton era “Third Way” centrists to South Korean progressives seeking the grounds of possibility in a “post-ideological” and then post-IMF neoliberal moment. The latter, more...

A review of To Return Home or “Return to Taiwan”: Conflicts and Survival in the “Voluntary Repatriation” of Chinese POWs in the Korean War, by David Cheng Chang. The most destructive phase of Korea’s unending civil war began with a North Korean invasion in 1950 and ended with a 1953 armistice. Almost all of the dramatic exchanges of territory, including the four falls of the Korean capital Seoul to invading armies, took place in the course of the first year as American-led UN and Chinese forces flooded onto the peninsula. During the two years of stalemate and bitter...

A review of La construction d’une identité religieuse bouddhiste en Corée du Sud (The Construction of a Buddhist Religious Identity in South Korea), by Florence Galmiche. Florence Galmiche’s The Construction of a Buddhist Religious Identity in South Korea is a 371-page dissertation, originally written in French, richly illustrated with photographs taken by the author. It includes a glossary, a list of informants, a list of primary sources, and a trilingual bibliography (English, French and Korean). It could be characterized as a classic thesis in social anthropology.  However, the subject...

A review of Embedded Voices In-Between Empires: The Cultural Formation of Korean Popular Music in Modern Times, by Yongwoo Lee. Yongwoo Lee’s timely dissertation defines Korean popular music as a storage space for collective memories and mass trauma. By examining two successive colonial histories that placed Korea under respective Japanese and American military rule, Lee reinterprets the empowerment represented by western sonic technologies such as the gramophone, phonograph records, and radio as arms of a global process of cultural appropriation and transmission. Out of this emerges an...

A review of Voices Heard: Women’s Right to Petition in Late Chosŏn Korea, by Jisoo Kim. Jisoo Kim’s Voices Heard: Women’s Right to Petition in Late Chosŏn Korea is a ground-breaking study of women’s petitions the state. Analyzing a copious amount of petition letters written by women during the Chosŏn dynasty, Kim shows how the Chosŏn court’s heightened sensitivity to the subjects’ grievances (wŏn) enabled its women to play an active role as petitioners, and even to challenge existing gender norms in the process. As such, Kim’s research stands in a long line of studies that...

A review of Le «pentecôtiste coréen» à l’épreuve de la transnationalisation: Le cas de l’église du Plein évangile de Cho Yonggi  (“Korean Pentecostalism” Facing Transnationalization: A Case Study of Cho Yonggi’s Full Gospel Church), by Kim Hui-yeon. This EHESS dissertation, defended on December 13 2011, is a sociological study of the well-known Full Gospel Church (Sunbogeum Gyohoe 순복음 교회) founded by Cho Yonggi 조용기 (1936- ) in 1958. While there is a body of literature on this Church, originally a small congregation affiliated with the Assemblies of God...

A review of Converting Dreams: Money, Religion and Belonging among Peruvian Migrant Laborers in South Korea, by Erica Vogel. Erica Vogel’s Converting Dreams: Money, Religion and Belonging among Peruvian Migrant Laborers in South Korea begins with an intriguing narrative about different kinds of “ends” unraveling in South Korea. It is summer 2009, and everyone is hobbling in the aftermath of the world economic crisis. Jobs are scarce, exchange rates are terrible, and immigration raids and deportations are on the rise. With policy changes effectively ending all legal migration routes from...

A review of South Korean Transnational Mothers: Familism, Cultural Criticism and Education Project, by Kyung Ju Ahn. Kyung Ju Ahn’s dissertation is a vividly written ethnography of a timely and relevant anthropological subject: the lives of South Korean middle-class wives who temporarily migrate abroad for their children’s education, usually living separately from their husbands, who remain in Korea. By stating “their stories are my story” (p. 27), she reveals her own identity and the experiences she shares with her research participants; situating the blurred boundary between the...

A review of Reconsidering the Body in Korean Modern Art:  Ku Ponung’s Body, World, and Art, by Jungsil Lee. Focusing upon the body in both its literal and metaphorical senses, Reconsidering the Body in Korean Modern Art investigates the Korean colonial period (1910-1945) through the lens of one of its more prominent public figures, the artist/author/critic Ku Ponung (1906-1953). Previous scholarship has focused on Ku’s career as one in which an avant-garde painter, once openly critical of the Japanese- and Western-centric art world that held sway in Korea, inexplicably turned into a...

A review of Intimate Encounters, Racial Frontiers: Stateless GI Babies in South Korea and the United States, 1953-1965, by Bongsoo Park. This dissertation examines the case of stateless “G.I. babies,” born to Korean women and fathered by U.S. military personnel, to trace transnational histories of race, ethnicity, nation, and gender between the United States and South Korea during the Cold War. Bongsoo Park fills gaps in the relatively understudied history of transnational adoption by addressing the case of mixed-race children (honhyola) sent for overseas adoption in the immediate post war...

Dissertation Reviews bids a very fond farewell to our inaugural Korean Studies editors, Nancy Abelmann and Laura Nelson, and expresses heartfelt thanks for all the work they did to get the Korea series up and running. We are also very proud to introduce our new Korean Studies editor, John DiMoia, who is carrying the torch and bringing the series in exciting new directions. In the tradition of the Dissertation Reviews project, the series will continue to feature friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations in Korean Studies. If you are interested in reviewing...

During the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, there will be an informal Dissertation Reviews Meet-and-Greet on Friday, March 16 at Barristers Bar in the Hilton Toronto [145 Richmond Street West - see map]. Dennis Frost, the Japan Studies editor, will be in attendance from 5pm to 7pm to chat and field questions about Dissertation Reviews (not only about Japan Studies, but also our present and future work on China, Japan, and Korea in all fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences). Hope to see you there! Please note that the meeting will be informal and BYOB (“buy your own...

Dissertation Reviews は、様々な分野で近年審査された、未刊行の博士論文の概要紹介（批評ではありません）を公開するウェブサイトです。 Tom...

Dissertation Reviews는 다양한 학문 분야에서 최근에 완성되었으나 아직 출판되지는 않은 박사 학위 논문들을 추려서 되도록 호의적인 태도로 소개하는 새로운 웹싸이트입니다. 이 싸이트는 톰 물라니 (Tom Mullaney; 스탠포드 대학 역사학과) 교수가 2010 설립한 것으로 각 학분 분야에서의 최근 학문 동향을 소개하는 데 그 목적을 두고 있습니다. 보통 단행본으로 묶여 나온 서적들은 연구가 끝난 뒤 몇 년 후에서야 출판되지만, 이 싸이트는 우리 학문 공동체에서...

Die neue Website Dissertation Reviews präsentiert unkritisch kürzlich verteidigte und bisher unpublizierte Dissertationen aus verschiedenen Fachrichtungen. Die Plattform, die 2010 vom Tom Mullaney (Assistant Professor für Geschichte, Stanford University) gegründet wurde, soll Forschern einen Einblick in die aktuellsten Entwicklungen in ihren jeweiligen Fächern bieten. Statt Monographien zu rezensieren, die oft erst Jahre nach Abschluss des Projektes erscheinen, widmet sich die Website den tatsächlich aktuellen Entwicklungen innerhalb der akademischen Gemeinschaft. Derzeit liegen...

Dissertation Reviews est un nouveau site web présentant des synopsis amicaux et non critiques de thèses de doctorat soutenues récemment et non publiées, relatives à une grande variété de domaines.

Fondé en 2010 par Tom Mullaney (Professeur adjoint en histoire à l’Université de Stanford), le site a été conçu pour offrir à tous les chercheurs un aperçu de l’état actuel de leur domaine respectif. Au lieu de faire la critique des monographies, dont la publication peut nécessiter des années après l’achèvement d’un projet, le site est consacré à l’analyse de ce...

A review of Contemporary Korean/American Evangelical Missions: Politics of Space, Gender, and Difference. By JU HUI JUDY HAN. In this 2009 dissertation for the department of geography at UC Berkeley, Ju Hui Judy Han asks what lies behind the many world evangelical missions undertaken by Koreans and Korean-Americans: What motivates the participants? What enables the mobilization of so much human effort? What beliefs underlie the enthusiasm for evangelical work abroad? And, finally, what understandings and effects are produced through the experience of mission? In exploring these questions, Han...

A Review of Beyond the Han Miracle: Soccer, Soap Operas, Stem Cells, and Sanitation, by YOON CHOI. Yoon Choi’s dissertation, Beyond the Han Miracle: Soccer, Soap Operas, Stem Cells, and Sanitation, focuses on bureaucratic engagements with discourses of national globalization by investigating sites of cultural production in South Korea. Choi’s is an innovative ethnography of the relationship between state ideologies of globalization and cultural institutions dedicated to the realization of global aspirations. The dissertation works to demonstrate “how variously positioned actors —...

A Review of Divining Capital: Spectral Returns and the Commodification of Fate in South Korea, by DAVID J. KIM. David J. Kim’s “Divining Capital” offers a major new analysis of South Korean shamanism in the present historical moment that is simultaneously a consideration of the present as a moment. Distinctive is Kim’s “peripatetic” approach to his subject, namely “walking through the city” and encountering divination practices amidst a landscape of commodities (p. 38). Chapter 1 weaves together ethnographic encounters with a consideration of the history of the category of...

A review of Immigration Challenges and “Multicultural” Responses: The State, the Dominant Ethnie and Immigrants in South Korea, by HUI-JUNG KIM. This dissertation broadly explores South Korea’s “multiculturalism explosion” in recent years, an unusual phenomenon given the country’s ethnically near-homogeneous population until the 1980s, and its long history of ethnic nationalism. Because of the country’s racial/ethnic diversification from labor and marriage migration, South Koreans have had to address the rapidly changing populace and the future of the nation’s identity, cultural...