Seoul National University

Jaebin Yoo is a Ph. D. candidate in Art History at Seoul National University, Korea. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Seoul National University and has been a lecturer teaching Korean Art History for the last five years. She is currently working on her dissertation, "Court-Sponsored Paintings from the Era of King Jeongjo (r.1776-1800)," in which she examines how King Jeongjo promoted paintings and prints to advance his own political aims and improve the image of the ruler. In particular, she hopes to illuminate the environment in which court art was worshipped, discussed, and distributed by placing these practices in their ritual, political, and bibliographical contexts. At HYI, she will focus on the increasing use of illustrated prints in official publications under Jeongjo’s order, and investigate his strategy of visualizing knowledge in relation to illustrated prints and encyclopedias that were officially imported from Qing China. 

JUNG Geung-Sik is Associate Professor, College of Law at Seoul National University, South Korea. His project at the Harvard-Yenching Institute examined the modes of acceptance and transformation of the Zhu Hsi's Family Ritual(朱子家禮) in the traditional society of Korea, Japan and China from comparative perspectives. He will think over universality as well as particularity of the Li (禮). And he will try to build a theory about the acceptance and the changes in norms and laws from the East Asian viewpoints.

CHO Young Hun's  main field of research is socio-economic history in the Ming-Qing period (1368-1911). He has lectured on pre-modern Chinese History in Seoul National University. The theme of his MA thesis was “The Changes of the Salt Distribution System and the Salt  Merchants in Yangzhou during the Ming Period. His Ph. D. dissertation was on the relation between the rise and fall of the merchants of Huizhou and the Grand Canal during the Ming-Qing period. This thesis aimed at both comparing rival merchant groups and focusing on the Grand Canal as the arena of their mercantile activities.

Sug-In Kweon is Professor of Anthropology at Seoul National University, Korea. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Seoul National University and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University. She has been interested in the issue of identity politics, in particular, building of identities of marginal groups in modern Japan including local communities, ethnic Koreans in Japan, and Japanese-Brazilian laborers in Japan. During the last several years, her main research interest has centered on Japanese settlers in colonial Korea with a focus on daily lives and practices of the ‘ordinary’ Japanese migrants. At HYI, Kweon will focus on the issue of gender within the Japanese settler community and investigate the ‘benefits’ and ‘constraints’ of the colonial context for the women.

LEE Hunmi is a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at Seoul National University, South Korea. Her research aim is to map out a historical structure of knowledge diffusion and examine its political role in East Asia.  Accordingly, she focuses on (i) the international and inter-civilizational circulation of significant political issues, books, and ideas, and (ii) the role of a creative reinterpretation intervening in translation by the agents who initiated international transfer.  While at the Harvard Yenching Institute as a visiting fellow, she worked on her doctoral dissertation ("International Origins of the Patriotic Enlightenment of Korea under Japanese Protectorate Rule"), designed to reflect the discontinuity of meaning and historical contingencies peculiar to the 'imported-modern' or pre-colonial situation of Korea.