KF뉴스레터-In Search of Origins

In Search of Origins

I do research of Korean history out of my overall fascination with origins. How we are connected to one another, where we come from, and how we got where we are - these are some of the lingering questions I have harbored since childhood. As much as reading about interesting persons, places, and events, I have also been drawn to genealogy, genetics, and primatology, among various fields of knowledge concerned with relationships.
During my college years at UCLA (1986-91), though, I had to take some detours before I could study what I desired. To my Korean immigrant parents in the United States, letting a seventeen-year old pick an “unpractical” major made little sense, and I chose my father’s college major: engineering. Soon regretting this course, during my second year, I switched my major to history on the condition that I would attend law school. Then, during the third year, when Professor John B. Duncan arrived at UCLA, he not only impressed me with engaging lectures of Korean history but also gave me a sense of what it is like to be a historian. After persuading my parents, I still had to decide on a specialization for graduate study. Although for years I had been drawn to Byzantine civilization, advice from professors and the academic job market prospects led me to study the social history of premodern Korea.
At Harvard (1991-99), my graduate training entailed more intensive study of Korean history through language training, learning about and reading relevant sources, and making professional connections. My advisor, Professor Edward W. Wagner, let me progress at my own pace and helped me choose a dissertation topic. Encouraged by our common interests in social mobility and genealogies as well as Harvard’s uniquely large collection of Joseon mugwa (military examination) rosters, I wrote my thesis on the political stature and social backgrounds of Joseon military officials. I came to realize that contrary to the common perception that military officials were inferior to civil officials in sociopolitical standing, men from all walks of life, from yangban to slaves, obtained posts in the military branch of officialdom.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale (1999-2000) and then as an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine (2000-), I re-conceptualized my dissertation to focus on late Joseon. In the research for my recently published book, Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination in Late Joseon Korea, 1600-1894 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), I gained a better understanding of what a mugwa degree meant to the hundreds of thousands of men in a country that was relatively free from security threats for over two centuries. Contrary to common perceptions, I found no social newcomers joining the ranks of the old yangban aristocracy, but well into the nineteenth century the mugwa institution fueled popular imaginations about martial feats and inspirations for status aspiration, without destabilizing the existing social order.
For my research, as well as teaching and study over the years, the Korea Foundation has extended invaluable support. I have received graduate scholarships (1994-95, 1996-99), a research travel grant (2001), and an Advanced Research Grant (2003-04). Moreover, the Korea Foundation funded both my visiting assistant professorship at McGill University (1998-99) and tenure-track assistant professorship at UC Irvine. As a scholar in a relatively small field, I have always been grateful for the support from the Foundation, with its staff of knowledgeable, helpful officers.
Currently, I am working on a new book project that examines a people without history. Looking at a jungin (“middle people”) family that was neither aristocrat nor commoner and has not yet been researched, I seek to complicate conventional understandings of jungin, vis-a-vis Korea’s modernity and ordinary people’s historical agency. Funded by a fellowship from Seoul National University Gyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies (2007-08), I am conducting archival research and oral history interviews in South Korea.
In the long run, I hope to better inform my historical and genealogical research with geneticists’ exciting new discoveries on population origins and migration routes. Thanks to their analyses of Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA mutation patterns that get transmitted through, respectively, direct male and direct female line of descent, we now have a whole new vista on what being an East Asian, a Korean, or a Miryang Pak, for example, may or may not mean after all. Admittedly, a bit too idealistic a goal, but still, as a scholar I want to promote an awareness that with greater knowledge we should view our identities for what they are rather than allowing them to divide us.

한국국제교류재단

In Search of Origins

SEARCH

In Search of Origins

SEARCH

전체메뉴