The Korean Studies Group Baeumtŏ
The Korean Studies Group Baeumtŏ was established in the spring of 2002. It is an organization for graduate students who have an interest in Korea in their research. The fields of research of our students include history, literature, art history, sociology, public policy, and law.
KSGB is a working group and provides a space in which the students can be critical and supportive of each other’s work.
KSGB also invites speakers, shows Korean cinema, and holds social events.
If you are interested in joining our mailing list, please send an email to Thomas Michael Ryan: tmr2145@columbia.edu
Graduate Students Focusing on Korea:
Suhyun Ahn, Ph.D., East Asian philosophy, sjahn@princeton.
Hyoseak (Stephen) Choi, PhD, Modern Japanese Literature, hc2963@columbia.edu
Stephen’s main research interests are in children’s literature, children’s culture, and the notion of childhood in Japan. His dissertation project deals with the cultural expansion of the Empire of Japan and the role of children within it. The project encompasses much more than “Japan,” including Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, as well as other colonial sites where children exist and participate in an “imperial culture.”
Yujin Choi, Ph.D., Political Theory, yc3394@columbia.edu
Yujin is a second year Ph.D. Student in the Political Science Department majoring in Political Theory. Her research interest is in theorizing women and minority rights in non-western societies, how they have developed and how the challenges they are facing are different from those of western societies. South Korea is her primary regional focus. She is also interested in theories of civil society, social movements, feminism, and post-colonialism.
Daniel Kim, Doctor of Jurisprudence
Daniel is a second-year student at Columbia Law School. He is interested in East Asian cooperation and integration, as it relates to broader questions of global governance in supranational levels. He received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from New York University.
Iris Kim, Ph D., Modern Korean Literature, ik2398@columbia.edu
Iris is a Ph.D. student of modern Korean literature and cultural studies. Her research interests include constructions of family and gender, visual culture, and translation. In her M.A. thesis, she examined how the changing representations of the orphan in the cultural field intertwined with constructions of motherhood and gendered identities in postwar South Korea. Iris received her B.A. in International Comparative Studies from Duke University and completed her M.A. in EALAC before joining the Ph.D. program.
Jeewon Monica Kim, Ph.D., Art History (Korea and Japan), jeewon.kim@columbia.edu
Jeewon is a third year Ph.D. student in the Art History Department. She studies the art and architecture of Japan and Korea, with a particular focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research interests include modern painting, the visual culture of imperialism, and urbanization under colonial rule.
Stella Kim, Ph.D., Premodern Korean History, ssk2217@columbia.edu
Stella is a PhD student in early modern Korean history. She focuses primarily on the late Chosŏn period, and her interests lie in mothering and motherhood, family and kinship, conceptions of death and the afterlife, as well as broader theoretical questions of feminist historiography. Stella holds a BA in Political Science from Brown University and a dual MA/MSc in International and World History from Columbia and the London School of Economics.
Mengheng Lee, Ph.D., Pre-Modern Korean History, ml4052@columbia.edu
Mengheng is a Ph.D. student in pre-modern Korean history. His research interests include the social, legal, and political history of Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) and contemporary Korean historiography. He also specializes in early modern Sino-Korean relations (Ming-Qing-Chosŏn relations). In his M.A. thesis, Menghengdiscussed border-crossing issues between Chosŏn and Manchu in the early 17th century, dealing with the repatriation of ukanju and Manchu-Chosŏn relations. Now he is working on examining the formation of the borderland between Qing and Chosŏn, and the social status system of Chosŏn. Before joining Columbia, he received both his B.A. (2011) and M.A. (2015) in Department of History at National Taiwan University and spent one year at Korea University, Korea (2013-2014) for his personal research.
Peter Moody, Ph.D., Modern Korean History, peter.moody@columbia.edu
Peter is a Ph.D. student in East Asian History specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of modern Korea and Japan. He is interested in looking at how the discourse of tradition vs. modern evolved during the colonial and post-war periods, particularly when state actors used notions of civilization and advancement to win support for political projects that were sometimes at the expense of the subaltern. Before coming to Columbia, he obtained his Master’s in East Asian Studies from the University of Virginia (2010) where he wrote his thesis on mass mobilization campaigns in North Korea. His recent research interests include microhistories of North Korean coastal cities and the intersection of North Korean ideology and cultural production, particularly when it comes to the popular music soundscape.
Jeongeun Park, Ph.D., History
Jeongeun is a first-year PhD student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her current research explores how North Korea syncretized Soviet cultural influences as part of the transnational cultural history of the Cold War in East Asia. She engages in digital humanities scholarship with an interest in quantitative textual analysis and virtual exhibitions. Jeongeun received her B.A. with Departmental Honors in History (minors in modern languages and digital humanities) from Stanford University. Her other research interests include propaganda, psychological warfare, and imperialism.
Thomas Ryan, Ph.D., Modern Korean History, tmr2145@columbia.edu
Thomas is a sixth-year PhD student in the History Department writing a dissertation on representations of war, mobilization, and development in South Korean media and literature from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. His research interests more generally include the global cold war, imperial knowledge production, economic development, conversion and recantation, historiography and pseudohistory, and memory studies. He holds a BA from the University of Victoria in Canada and an MA and MPhil from Columbia, and has lived in Kwangju, South Chŏlla Province and Seoul, where he has divided most of his time between Sungkyunkwan University and Korea University.
Sohee Ryuk, Ph.D., Modern European History, sr3451@columbia.edu
Sohee is a first-year Ph.D. student of history in the Modern European field. Sohee is interested in the development of ideas of nationality and ethnicity, nationality policies in the Soviet Union as well as their cultural ramifications, intersections between material culture and industrialization, and the Korean diaspora.
Megan Sungyoon, M.F.A., Writing
Megan Sungyoon is an M.F.A. candidate specializing in Poetry and Literary Translation at Columbia University. Sungyoon’s research and practice focus on issues of translation, national language, and subjectivity.
Mi Hyun Yoon, Ph.D., American Studies, yoon.mihyun@rutgers.edu
Mi Hyun is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Rutgers University whose research looks at the history of the Korean diaspora in the United States through the transnational context of Asian America and South Korea. Her dissertation project explores citizenship, nation, civil society, and identity by analyzing the political activities of the South Korean diasporic community in the United States between 1980 and 2017.