From the legendary avant-garde poet Kim Hyesoon, a landmark collection documenting her first and only work of digital performance art to date. “Poetry in Korea has been a vaunted form — and traditionally left to men. Kim broke away from the masculine styles that came before her… Kim has pursued a vernacular that’s intensely Korean … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 5)
Divided Korea: Understanding Unification Narratives
Divided Korea: Understanding Unification Narratives examines how different visions of Korean unification have been formed and contested across history, politics, and culture. From Cold War propaganda to digital diplomacy, or from South Korea’s democratic reforms to North Korea’s Juche ideology, the volume illustrates how unification is regarded as both hope and threat, promise and peril. … [Read More]
Korea Around the Table: Food and Global Korean Identities [forthcoming]
Korea Around the Table: Food and Global Korean Identities brings together leading scholars to examine how Korean cuisine encodes identity, memory, and belonging across local and global contexts. From the early adoption of chili peppers on the Korean peninsula to the proliferation of sundubu jjigae restaurants in suburban New Jersey, this groundbreaking volume shows how … [Read More]
Making Korea: 50 Design Stories [forthcoming]
The meteoric rise and global impact of Hallyu has made South Korea a cultural powerhouse, where pop-culture and cosmetic surgery co-exist with centuries-old shamanistic and Confucian rituals. This vibrant creative force, a potent mix of the traditional and hyper-new, informs Korean design today. Drawing on the V&A’s renowned collection, this compelling publication explores social history … [Read More]
The Art of Korean Cooking
A beautifully produced cookbook featuring eighty recipes inspired by traditional Korean cuisine, alongside illuminating essays on the country’s culinary history. The Art of Korean Cooking is a definitive introduction to Korean cuisine and a beautifully crafted cookbook. It compiles more than eighty recipes, each meticulously researched and tested by Onjium – a cultural research institute … [Read More]
The Seoul Letter Shop [forthcoming]
A touching testament to the power of letter writing and connecting with strangers, for fans of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and What You’re Looking For is in the Library. Hyoyoung feels trapped in her small hometown after her dreams of becoming a film maker are dashed. When a friend asks if she can take … [Read More]
Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea
A briskly written primer on the North Korean decisions, foreign interventions and accidents of fate which have both threatened and, ultimately, preserved the country’s dictatorship. This nimble tour through North Korea’s history revisits sixteen knife-edge moments when collapse, reform or war nearly shattered the Kim dynasty. Structured in four acts—from the peninsula’s partition in 1945 … [Read More]
The First Protestant Martyr in Korea from Wales: The Life and Ministry of Robert Jermain Thomas
The First Protestant Martyr in Korea from Wales: The Life and Ministry of Robert Jermain Thomas explores the life and legacy of Robert Jermain Thomas, a Welsh missionary who played a pivotal role in the early Korean church. Despite facing historical misunderstandings and political distortions — especially during Japanese colonial rule and Cold War tensions … [Read More]
City in a Future Tense: The Making of a Smart City in South Korea [forthcoming]
Songdo, South Korea, is one of the earliest and most ambitious smart city projects. Mythical narratives have painted it as a promised land of the future where the problems and struggles of the present have been efficiently transcended—or concealed—by technology. In City in a Future Tense, Chamee Yang interrogates these myths and traces Songdo’s story to show how it … [Read More]
Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity
This book traces the origins and transformations of a people-the Zainichi, or Koreans “residing in Japan.” Using a wide range of arguments and evidence-historical and comparative, political and social, literary and pop-cultural-John Lie reveals the social and historical conditions that gave rise to Zainichi identity, while exploring its vicissitudes and complexity. In the process he sheds … [Read More]
The State’s Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea
The State’s Sexuality uncovers how the lives and work of women engaged in prostitution, long considered the most abased members of society, have been strategically intertwined with the lofty purpose of building South Korea’s postcolonial nation-state. Through a complicated, contradictory patchwork of laws and regulations, which Park Jeong-Mi conceptualizes as a “toleration-regulation regime,” the South Korean … [Read More]
ImagiNation: Deconstructing South Korea’s Modern Miracles [forthcoming]
In less than a century, South Korea has remarkably transformed its image from one of the world’s poorest nations to a center of global influence. Not just one but a series of so-called modern miracles transformed the country into an exceptional case of national image-making and image-shifting. In contrast with the utilitarian focus of much … [Read More]
Have you had your rice?
Kieun Kiaer’s food poems are rich with emotion – intimate, layered and unexpectedly expansive. Food may not speak in words, but in her poetry, it speaks volumes. Her voice is gentle yet precise, full of clarity and care. When asked why someone with such an accomplished academic career would turn to writing poetry about Korean … [Read More]
Supernatural Encounters in South Korea
Twenty years of whispered stories, haunted places, restless spirits, and things that linger where history runs deep. These are real claims from real people across Korea. Read, wonder, and decide for yourself. Over the past twenty-plus years, folk heritage researcher Shawn Morrissey has collected paranormal claims from across South Korea. The creepiest and most intriguing … [Read More]
Opposing Desires: The Contentious Politics of the South Korean Anti-LGBT Movement
In times of right-wing populists gaining traction worldwide, conservative Christians engage in both continuous and dynamic action forms to gain societal and political hegemony. Hendrik Johannemann delves deeply into the contentious practices of the South Korean anti-LGBT movement, investigating its roots, framing strategies, transnational ties, and political endeavors. Sociologists, political scientists and practitioners alike will discover … [Read More]
Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War
The Korean War was never formally declared, and no peace treaty ending the war was ever signed. The 1953 armistice did not stop the war but marked its extension and expansion into a warlike state of emergency. How did the new reality of life under armistice shape visions of the possible in North and South … [Read More]