hankyoreh

Feb. 24. (Photo by Kwon Tae-ho)　

By Kwon Tae-ho, Washington Correspondent　

At Encina Hall on the campus of Stanford University in the United States, around twenty Korean and U.S. scholars and politicians held a serious debate over North Korea starting at 8 a.m. last Thursday. This seminar, titled “DPRK 2012,” was held by Stanford’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center to commemorate the tenth anniversary of its Korean studies program. The debate, which lasted until 5 in the afternoon, was close in character to a North Korea seminar held by a Washington think tank.

The field of Korean studies has been diversifying. In the past, the mainstream of the discipline focused on the humanities, including Joseon-era history, language, and culture. In recent times, however, the range of areas has grown more diverse, with focuses on North Korea issues, South Korea-U.S. relations, and South Korean society.

Early centers of Korean studies, which began in earnest in the United States following the Korean War, included “Harvard-Yenching Institute in the East and the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center. They were followed by the University of Washington (UW), under Professor James Palais, as well as the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Southern California (USC), the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), and Stanford, all of which are attended by many Korean students. Also operating Korean studies centers are Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and the University of Michigan, for a total of eleven universities. Forty-four universities have established positions for Korean studies professors, and around 200 have courses in Korean studies.

In the case of the UCLA, where a Korean studies center was established in 1993, there was only one Korean studies professor in its Asian languages and cultures department as recently as twenty years ago. Today, the program has expanded to include six Korean studies professors and 55 Korean studies courses. And whereas some 90 percent of students in the courses were of Korean descent just ten years ago, today non-Korean U.S. students account for over half. Part of this is due to the increased standing of South Korea, but it is also connected with a rise in interest in the country as popular culture such as films and TV series has enjoyed popularity. The 100th Korea Foundation forum last year included a report entitled “Plastic Surgery, Gender, and Modernity in Korean Film.”

However, a significant disparity with Chinese and Japanese studies continues. As of 2009, the 6,700 members of the Association for Asian Studies in the United States included 2,784 researchers in Chinese studies, or 42 percent, and 1,788 in Japanese studies, or 28 percent, compared to just 400 in Korean studies, or 5 percent. Of the 45 professors in Harvard’s East Asian Studies Department, Chinese and Japanese studies account for 12 each, compared to three Korean studies professors.

Even if it is realistically unlikely for Korean studies to surpass Chinese or Japanese studies, a great deal of potential remains for development in light of South Korea’s economic standing and popularity of its cultural exports. A major obstacle to Korean studies research is the fact that the programs at all but a few universities are unable to develop beyond a small scale due to financial problems.

Following its establishment of the Korea Foundation in 1991, the South Korean government has been providing support for Korean studies research at universities overseas. This year, the foundation has provided a total of $1.45 million in support for Korean studies research at U.S. universities. However, it is rare to find active support from corporations, as seen in Japan. The only examples are business like Korean Air, the Tongyang Group, and Pantech, which support Korean studies at Stanford and USC.

“In the United States, they say that Chinese studies are supported by the Chinese community, Japanese studies by business, and Korean studies by the government,” said Han Jae-ho, director of the Korea Foundation’s Los Angeles office. “Since there are limitations to government support, with budget issues and so forth, the level of interest from corporations for the sake of the diversification of Korean studies has been disappointing.”

Starting this year, the foundation is pursuing a plan to build a system linking Korean studies courses, allowing even students at universities without Korean studies programs to take classes at nearby universities that do have them.

The godfather of Korean studies in the U.S. is the late UW Professor James Palais (1934-2006). While there were some U.S. scholars who studied Korea before Palais, he contributed to the development of the field while serving as director of UW’s Center for Korea Studies in the 1970s, fostering many pupils such as Bruce Cumings, today with the University of Chicago, and advancing the field of Korean studies at different universities across the country through them. Another of his students is SungKongHoe University professor Han Hong-koo. Due to this influence, the students earned the nicknames of “the Palais division,” and Palais himself that of “godfather of the Washington Mafia.”

Palais, who first explored Korean studies while serving in the U.S. Forces in Korea for one year in 1957 following his graduation from Harvard, specialized in the later years of the Joseon period, but he also took part actively in the South Korean democratization movement in the 1970s and 1980s. There is a famous story recounting how the Park Chung-hee administration tried to offer him $1 million in support in the 1970s, but Palais refused it, saying he could not accept it while the human rights and workers movements were being repressed and South and North Korea were in conflict. In 2002, he served as the first director of the Academy of East Asian Studies at Sungkyunkwan University.

Harvard University Professor Edward Wagner (1924-2001), who had an academic influence on Palais, could be categorized as a first-generation Korea scholar in the U.S. Wagner entered the field of Korean studies upon returning to the U.S. after serving as a civilian officer with the U.S. military administration in 1946-48. In 1981, he established the Korea Institute at Harvard University and served as its first director until 1993.

If Palais and Wagner represented the first generation, Palais’s students could be categorized as the second. Among those active as directors of Korean studies institutes or researchers in Korean studies are Cumings, John Duncan at UCLA, Carter Eckhardt at Harvard, and Michael Robinson at Indiana University.

In most cases, the early Korean studies researchers were people who changed their academic course after visiting or encountering Korea through USFK or the Peace Corps. Duncan, head of the UCLA Center for Korean Studies, was a former USFK soldier who majored in Korean history at Korea University. Duncan and Cumings have also formed personal relationships with Korea, as both are married to Koreans.

The rising third generation of Korean studies scholars includes Professor Theodore Hughes of Columbia, who studies modern Korean literature, and USC Korean Studies Institute Director David Kang, who studies North Korea issues.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]