A one-day workshop on new developments in North Korean history
11 September 2015, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
SOAS Russell Square: College Buildings, Room L67
Introduction
A family moving into a newly built, modern flat in Pyongyang, 1958
Despite the ever-growing popular fascination with North Korea, general understanding of the country and its history is advancing much more slowly. At times it seems like a country without a history. A country where the society, from top to bottom, is inscrutable to historical knowledge. The outline of North Korea’s political history is fairly well known and numerous books chart the rise of Kim Il Sung and the establishment of North Korea’s monolithic political-ideological system. But beyond this our understanding of the country’s history is obscured both by the DPRK state with its near total control of information about North Korea and substantial capacity for historical mythmaking, and by the preconceptions and narrow concerns of media and academia in the English-speaking world. This is reflected most sharply in a dearth of English-language works on the social history of North Korea.
Fortunately this situation has begun to change in recent years with the publication of books by Charles Armstrong and Suzy Kim, focusing mainly on the earliest period of North Korean history (1945-1950) and with new Korean-language work such as that of Sunghoon Han, focusing on the Korean War and the 1950s. This workshop will seek to bring together a number of scholars from around the world working on new social histories of North Korea as a way of further developing this new field of research.
Confirmed speakers
Sunghoon Han, Yonsei University
Suzy Kim, Rutgers University: Historicizing North Korea: Socialist Modernity, Everyday Life, and Intimate Archives
Cheehyung Harrison Kim, University of Missouri: Surplus and Solidarity: Migration of North Korea’s War Orphans
Andre Schmid, University of Toronto: Towards a Social History of (Self) – Criticism and Class in Postwar North Korea
Carl A. Young, University of Western Ontario: The Friendly Party: The Ch’ondogyo Young Friends Party in Early North Korea
Adam Cathcart, University of Leeds: Neighbor, Perpetrator: Sinchon and Transborder Violence in South Hwanghae Province, 1945-1950
It’s very cheap for an academic conference in general.
“Come along, and then let your hair down with punk band No Brain later that evening.”
*Lol* Philip, I'd like to see you let your hair down.
Just fill me up with enough soju 😉