Emotions, Affect, and Narrative in Korean History and Culture
About this Event
About the Talk
This collection of eleven essays explores emotions and affect in Korean culture across a broad temporal span, from the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392) to the present. Drawing on a diverse array of sources—including memoirs, diplomatic letters, newspapers, films, video diaries, photographs, and ethnographic interviews—the volume examines how emotions intervene in public discourse and how affect is shaped, intensified, and managed through expressive practices. Each contributor’s critical intervention lies in offering a non-essentializing approach to studying emotions and affect in Korea. Rather than positing uniquely “Korean” feelings such as han or hwabyŏng as inherent or fixed emotional traits, the contributors argue that what is culturally distinctive is not the emotions themselves but how they have been expressed, mediated, and interpreted within specific social relationships and historical experiences. In this framework, emotions and affect are not static or universal but are historically and discursively produced.
Emotions, Affect, and Narrative in Korean History and Culture also contends that to understand the present, we must critically engage with the emotional content of the past. By analyzing how different historical actors and social groups expressed particular feelings at specific moments, the essays illuminate how emotions and affect were used to narrate lived experiences and construct discourses in textual, literary, and visual forms. Together, these studies reveal how emotions and affect have functioned as a powerful medium for shaping collective memory, identity, and political subjectivity in Korea. Structured in three parts, the volume explores how emotions and affect have taken shape across different historical epochs and social milieus in Korea. Each contributor examines the shifting ways these emotional narratives have been formed, expressed, and transformed over time. Emotions, Affect, and Narrative in Korean History and Culture contributes to the dynamic field of emotion studies by adding important Korean examples.
The book can be purchased via the University of Hawai'i Press.
Doors will open no sooner than 15 minutes before the start time.
The Elliott School can coordinate with the university to reasonably accommodate most disabilities. If you need specific accommodations, please contact the Sigur Center at [email protected]. Requests should be made as soon as possible, but at least three days prior to the program to ensure accommodation.
Opening Remarks
Alyssa Ayres was appointed dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs and professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University effective February 1, 2021. She is the first woman to serve in the role of permanent dean at the school. Ayres is a foreign policy practitioner and award-winning author with senior experience in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. From 2013 to 2021, she was senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where she remains an adjunct senior fellow.
Her work focuses primarily on India’s role in the world and on U.S. relations with South Asia in the larger Indo-Pacific. Her book about India’s rise on the world stage, , was published by Oxford University Press in January 2018 and was selected by the Financial Times for its “Summer 2018: Politics” list. An updated paperback edition was released in 2019. Ayres is also interested in the emergence of subnational engagement in foreign policy, particularly the growth of international city networks, and her current book project (working title, “Bright Lights, Biggest Cities: The Urban Challenge to India’s Future,” under contract with Oxford University Press) examines India’s urban transformation and its international implications.
Ayres has been awarded numerous fellowships and has received four group or individual Superior Honor Awards for her work at the State Department. She speaks Hindi and Urdu, and in the mid-1990s worked as an interpreter for the International Committee of the Red Cross. She received an AB from Harvard College and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Halifax International Security Forum agenda group, and she serves on the boards of the National Endowment for Democracy and the Women’s Foreign Policy Group. In 2021 and 2022, the Washingtonian included her as one of their “most influential people shaping policy.”
About the Speakers
Gregg A. Brazinsky works on U.S.-East Asian relations and East Asian international history. He is interested in the flow of commerce, ideas, and culture among Asian countries and across the Pacific. He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese and Korean. He is the author of two books: (2017), which focuses on Sino-American Rivalry in the Third World, and (2007), which explores U.S.-South Korean relations during the Cold War. Currently, he is working on two other book projects. The first examines American nation-building in Asia during the Cold War. The second explores Sino-North Korean relations between 1949 and 1992 and focuses specifically on the development of cultural and economic ties between the two countries. He has received numerous fellowships to support his research, including the Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Smith Richardson Foundation junior faculty fellowship, and a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Center. Professor Brazinsky also currently serves as the director of the George Washington Cold War Group.
As director of the Asian Studies Program, Professor Brazinsky has attracted some of the brightest students from around the country and the world who share a commitment to pursuing careers related to Asia. He helped to launch a special mentoring program for Asian Studies MA students and has worked to expand fellowship and professional opportunities for students in the program.
Sonja M. Kim is an Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University. A historian of health and welfare in Korea, she is the author of Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019) and co-editor of Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea (University of Hawai'i Press, 2021).
Suzy Kim is a historian and author of Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell 2023), and Everyday Life in the North Korea Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick. She is senior editor of positions: asia critique and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Korean Studies and Yŏsŏng kwa yŏksa [Women and History], the journal of the Korean Association of Women’s History.
About the Moderator
Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She was Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017–2024) and is Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018–2025). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies (2020–Present). She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also editor of Emotions, Affect, and Narrative in Korean History and Culture (University of Hawai'i Press) and co-editor, with William Haboush, of The Great East Asian War of 1592 and the Birth of the Korean Nation. She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Criminalizing Adultery: Marriage, Sexual Custom, and Intimate Legality in Korea. In 2023, she received a Distinguished Research Award from the Ministry of Education in South Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.
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