Korea Day: Nordic Research in Korean Studies

The Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies is pleased to welcome Youngeun Koo, who recently joined as an Associate Senior Lecturer with a focus on contemporary Korean society. This position is partially funded by the Korea Foundation. 

To celebrate and enhance the Centre’s Korea program, we are organizing a half-day workshop on Thursday 21 November, bringing together both junior and senior scholars of Korean Studies from across the Nordic countries.

The workshop will feature a session showcasing new research on Korea by junior scholars and PhD students. It will also include a roundtable discussion with senior scholars on the current state and future of Korean Studies, the challenges in the field, its relationship with other regional studies, and the contributions of Nordic and European academic communities.

We invite anyone interested in the latest research and teaching trends in Korean Studies to join us. 

• REGISTRATION NOW CLOSED!

Program

Welcome Remarks (13:00-13:10)

Johannes Persson, Dean of the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology

Marina Svensson, Head of the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies

New Research in Nordic Korean Studies (13:10-14:40)

Moderator: Nicholas Loubere (Lund, Senior Lecturer)

13:10-13:40 Youngeun Koo (Lund), “It was a Kind of Women’s Movement”: Professional Social Work, Unwed Mothers, and the Making of a Gendered Care System in South Korea, 1954-1975

13:40-14:10 Amos Farooqi (Copenhagen), Hagwŏn Hip-Hop: Korean Hip-hop’s Reproduction of the Local Education System and Youth Negotiation of Space and Escape

14:10-14:40 Tintin Appelgren (Stockholm), Blindness narratives in Korean literature: Focusing on the tale of Sim Ch'ŏng

Coffee Break (14:40-15:00)
 

Roundtable Discussion: The Past, Present, and Future of Korean Studies (15:00-16:30)

Moderator: Youngeun Koo

Vladimir Tikhonov (Oslo)

Sabine Burghart (Turku)

Barbara Wall (Copenhagen)

Sonja Häussler (Stockholm)

Andrew Logie (Helsinki) 

Biographies of participants (in alphabetical order by surname)
 

Tintin Appelgren is a PhD student at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University. Their research project is concerned with cultural and literary narratives of disability within a Korean context, focusing specifically on blindness narratives in contemporary South Korean literature and film. Their research interests also include disability history and historical representations of disability, as well as disability in a global context.

Sabine Burghart, Dr. phil., is University Lecturer and Academic Director of the Master’s Degree Programme in East Asian Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) of the University of Turku. Before joining CEAS she was a lecturer and researcher at the Department of East Asian Studies of the University of Vienna. Her research interests concern North Korea’s foreign aid relationships, ownership in South Korea’s development partnerships and Finland-DPRK relations. She spent more than five years of her professional career in Korea, and facilitated various capacity building projects and three EU-DPRK workshops in North Korea.

Amos Farooqi is a PhD Fellow in Korean Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His current research project analyzes how space and place have conditioned the practices and attachments of Korean hip-hop artists, focusing on the effects of hyper-condensed space on the development and trajectory of the localized form of the genre. He has previously conducted research and published work on the state of underground hip-hop scenes in provincial localities in Korea, focusing on the effects of cultural deterritorialization on local identities within the country. His main research interests are subcultures, locality, and urbanism.

Youngeun Koo is a tenure-track Associate Senior Lecturer at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University. Her research explores the intersecting histories of humanitarianism, (social) science, and care. Her current book project, Governing Care: Professional Social Work and the Making of the International Adoption Industry in Cold War South Korea, 1953–1979, examines the development of one of the world’s largest international adoption programs through the lens of professional social work. Her research has been published in the Journal of Social History and the Journal of Asian Studies. Koo earned her PhD from the University of Tübingen in 2022. Before joining Lund, she was the SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.

Andrew Logie is an Associate Professor of Korean studies at the University of Helsinki. His current research interests encompass five areas: Korean archaeology of Asia from late prehistory to early states; popular discourses of early Korea and Asia with a focus on Korean pseudohistory; comparative approaches to early Korea and Mainland Southeast Asia; new religious movements; and twentieth-century popular music history.

Vladimir Tikhonov is a Professor of Korean and East Asian studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University. Previously, he taught at Kyunghee University (Seoul, 1997-2000). His research focuses on the history of modern ideas in Korea and currently on the Korean Communist movement. He published Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: The Beginnings (Brill, 2010) as well as Modern Korea and its Others: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity (Routledge, 2015).He also recently co-authored Intellectuals In Between: Koreans in a Changing World, 1850 to 1945 (Peter Lang, 2022) and co-edited Buddhist Modernities - Re-inventing Tradition in the Globalizing Modern World (Routledge, 2017) and Military Chaplaincy in an Era of Religious Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2017). His most recent book is The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919–1945 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023).

Barbara Wall is an Associate Professor in Korean Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She has a BA in Japanese Studies and Classical Chinese from Heidelberg University, an MA in Confucian Studies from Sungkyunkwan University, and a PhD in Korean Literature from Ruhr-University Bochum. She is interested in the circulation, translation, and adaptation of literary narratives in Korea, Japan and China. Her first book The Dynamic Essence of Transmedia Storytelling: A Graphical Approach to The Journey to the West in Korea has appeared in Brill’s East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture series in 2024.