Education:
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.A., Columbia University
B.A., Sungkyunkwan University
Biography:
I am a socio-cultural and religious historian of modern Korea and East Asia, with a particular interest in intersections of spatio-temporality, religions, and nationalism/colonialism in global contexts. My current book project examines Korea’s place in the world and its fluid relationship to the increasingly global reach of modern time at the turn of the twentieth century. It explores how a combination of standardized temporal units—embodied in the twenty-four-hour (mechanical) clock, the seven-day week, and the Gregorian solar calendar—engaged with Koreans’ political struggles, religious practices, and everyday lives from the late Chosŏn through the colonial era. By showing that Koreans from different social backgrounds maintained their inherited ways of reckoning time and turned the temporal discipline imposed upon them into a site of contestation, my work demonstrates that Koreans undermined the universalizing regime of modern time and Japanese colonial hegemony. To this end, it reveals that Koreans were not passive and belated recipients, but active and coeval agents of global modernity and that its development was a heterogeneous and contested process.
Selected Publications:
“Text beyond Context: Power, Discourse, and the Chŏng Kam nok in Colonial Korea,” Journal of Korean Religions, vol. 11, no. 1 (April 2020): 123–153.
“Temporalities of Tonghak: Eschatology, Rebellion, and Civilization,” Journal of Korean Studies, vol. 25, no. 2 (March 2020): 57–87.
“Resembling the Opponent: Korean Nationalist and Japanese Colonialist Historiography in Modern Korea,” Acta Koreana, vol. 21, no. 2 (December 2018): 525–552.
Teaching:
Reading Modern Korean History through Film (Fall 2020)
Modern Japanese History: Culture, Empire, and Everyday Life (Fall 2020)
Religious and Cultural History of Korea (Spring 2021)
Time, Space, and Modernity in East Asian History (Spring 2021)
Senior Thesis Seminar (Spring 2021)