CKR congratulates Ariella Napoli, McJimsey Student Paper Award recipient, on her paper, “Plurality within Singularity: Choson Korea’s Neo-Confucian Framework,” published in ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts. Napoli will be attending the 2019 ASIANetwork 27th Annual Conference to present her work. Napoli is a Junior at Barnard College in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures. She is specifically interested in Korean studies, with an emphasis on the interaction between religion and politics. Next year, she will write a senior thesis which will explore the intersection between Protestantism and politics in the early modern period. Here is what she says about her paper: “This paper argues that while there was no singular, cohesive, “national identity” in the modern sense in Chosŏn Korea, the elitist Neo-Confucian framework served as a basis for establishing an overarching identity on the Korean Peninsula as every other identity defined itself through its relationship to the prominent Neo-Confucian framework. In order to accomplish this, this paper analyses the way in which two marginalized groups – Buddhist institutions and the Catholic Church – defined themselves and developed identities based around the Neo-Confucian framework. By demonstrating that these two marginalized groups had no choice but to define themselves in terms of the Neo-Confucian framework, it is clear that this framework created an elitist identity that was built around its intellectual culture.”