Committee on Korean Studies

AAS KOREAN STUDIES MENTORSHIP MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT
Time: March 21st (Thurs.), 4:00pm – 5:30pm
Location: the Terrace room of Shertaon Denver Downtown Hotel
We are taking applications from approximately 10 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who seek to be matched with mentors for a one-on-one teatime conversation at AAS. To participate in this program, please sign up at the link below. In the RSVP form, you will be asked to identify your area of research and list your first and second choice dream mentor with a short explanation. If one of those people is in attendance at AAS (see the list of Korea-related panels in the newsletter for panelists who will definitely be in attendance), the CKS board will try hard to convince them to meet with you! Applications will be accepted on the first-come, first-served basis. RSVP at  https://goo.gl/forms/f1l5eBgRy0rhor1m1

CKS GENERAL MEETING
Time: March 22nd (Fri.), 9-10:30 pm
Location: Governor’s Square 12
Preliminary Agenda:
Restructuring CKS: the April 2018 survey and its outcomes
CKS’s current programs: CKS’s sponsorship of AAS panels; CKS’s mentoring meeting; the revamped CKS website and its resources; the CKS newsletter: its rebirth and future growth; proposals under
Open Floor for Members’ Discussion: What works and what doesn’t with CKS? How can CKS better serve the needs of the Korean studies community? What new initiatives would CKS members like to see implemented in the short, medium, or long term?

CKS ROUNDTABLE: KOREAN STUDIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Time: March 23rd (Sat.), 9:00 AM – 10:45 AM
Location: Majestic Ballroom, Tower Bldg.
The field of Korean Studies has been rapidly expanding in the past two decades and now includes areas and subjects as disparate as language, literature, history, film and media studies, social science, and more. As the community of researchers, teachers, and students also grows in size, it has become more difficult to gain an overview of the current state of the field as well as its direction in future years. In this interdisciplinary roundtable, established scholars from different areas of the field will try to address a variety of questions. What are the current trends within specific disciplines? How can these trends be placed in relation to each other, and how can we project them forward to envision the field in, say, five, ten, and twenty years? What are the major challenges, both scholarly and professional, that we face within as well as across disciplines? And what advice should be given to those who are entering Korean Studies today? Marion Eggert, professor and chair of the Korean Studies department at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, will offer her perspective as a specialist in premodern history and literature. Dal Yong Jin, professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada, will present his insights as a leading expert in media studies. Michael Kim, professor of Korean history at Yonsei University, South Korea, will offer observations from the field of modern history. Robert Oppenheim, associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, will reflect on developments in anthropology. And Sunyoung Park, associate professor in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California, will moderate the interactive discussion with the audience while also sharing her own observations on modern Korean literary studies.

For  the full list of Korean panels and papers at AAS Denver 2019, see the Newsletter on this website. 

Dear Korean Studies community:

The Committee on Korean Studies, a unit of the Association for Asian Studies, is planning to expand its website (https://koreanstudies.org/), and we would like to invite you to take advantage of this opportunity to share your expertise and news with the Korean studies community.

Among other things, we will be building an archive of syllabi on the Koreas.  We hope that this archive will offer a source of help and inspiration to everyone teaching about the Koreas, particularly younger scholars just beginning teaching positions.

If you would be willing to volunteer a syllabus or syllabi for this online archive, please create the file in PDF format.  We would recommend omitting certain personal information (office location, telephone number), the personal information of any teaching assistants, and any boilerplate text related to a local teaching context.  The intellectual property status of syllabi is an area of present legal dispute; if this is of concern to you, please feel free any copyright or similar statement that you wish.  The CKS website is not password protected, and any syllabi we post will be freely available to anyone on the internet.

Please send any syllabi you wish to offer for this project to one of the following CKS officers, depending on its discipline, by September 15:

Dal Yong Jin (Film and media studies): yongjin23@gmail.com
Jisoo Kim (History): jsk10@gwu.edu
Robert Oppenheim (Social sciences): rmo@austin.utexas.edu
Sunyoung Park (Literature, performance, and arts): cks.aas.11@gmail.com

We thank you in advance for your submissions and for your participation in this project! Please note that we are now also accepting conference announcements to be displayed on the CKS website.  For these submissions, please forward them to cks.aas.11@gmail.com with the job or conference title in your subject line.  They will be posted on a weekly basis for free access to the public.

Finally, CKS will be initiating a twice-yearly newsletter which will be distributed to members and available on our website. Please send newsletter items to CedarBough Saeji (c.saeji@gmail.com) who will be editing the next newsletter. You are welcome to send items such as announcements of your new position, promotion, or successful grant application, your recent publications (from 2017-2018), other musings you would like to share with colleagues, and anything else including some brilliant photo you took last time you were in Korea. In addition we may be soliciting some specific short pieces, so look out for those emails. The deadline for submissions is December 31.

Thank you for all your contributions and encouragement for CKS’s community-building efforts.

Best regards,

The Committee on Korean Studies