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Korean Studies in the United States: The Challenges Ahead

At the 7th KF Forum, AAS President Robert Buswell made a presentation on the various challenges facing the promotion of Korean Studies in the U.S. academic sector, and the tasks that lie ahead to close the gap with other fields of Asian Studies.

In a few American universities, generally those on the east and west coasts, Asian Studies is beginning to become mainstreamed in academe in ways that studies of America’s European heritage were until the current generation. At my university of UCLA, for example, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures has grown from twelve faculty, five lecturers, and no Koreanists, when I first arrived some two decades ago, to 26 faculty, 20 lecturers, and six tenured or tenure-track Koreanists today. In our ALC department alone, the Korean division offers a total of 22 graduate courses on Korea and currently has 28 Ph.D. students in a wide range of fields, including Buddhism, history, linguistics, and literature. We estimate that there are approximately 70 faculty across the university with active research interests that involve Korea, offering nearly 200 courses with a substantial Korean component, which enroll thousands of students annually.
Although the number of Koreanists active in American academe has increased exponentially over the last two decades, it still remains far below the comparative figures for scholars of China and Japan. In the Association for Asian Studies, the major professional organization in North America for Asia specialists, there are approximately 6,700 total members. Of these, 2,784 list their area of interest as China and Inner Asia (42 percent), 2,188 as Northeast Asia (Japan and Korea, 33 percent), 729 as South Asia (11 percent), 862 as Southeast Asia (13 percent), and 67 unspecified (1 percent). Although the Association does not break out respective figures for Japan and Korea, we estimate that the number of scholars, whose primary focus of research is Korea, is only about 400, or a little over 5 percent of our total membership. Even though we have roughly doubled our numbers over the last decade, we obviously have a long way to go before Korean Studies can really be seen as on a par with Chinese or even Japanese Studies. Much the same can be said about the coverage of Korea on American university campuses. Despite the dramatic recent growth in the field, the number of universities with more than two or three Korea specialists on the faculty still remains small. Even at the large research universities, where much of the expansion has occurred, Korea remains seriously underrepresented.

Facing the Challenges Ahead
The continuing challenge facing Korean Studies is how to recruit new students into the field and help those who have already made a personal commitment to the field to establish themselves. Up until just a few years ago, many Koreanists were developed either by “retooling” or converting Sinologists (as in my case) or Japanologists to the Korean field, or by recruiting Korea returnees from military intelligence, the Peace Corps, or overseas missions. Except for the occasional Mormon missionary, both of these sources of potential Koreanists have all but dried up.
Instead, we are beginning to see a narrowing of the field to scholars of Asian descent, a group we term “heritage” students. In both Social Sciences and Humanities, the vast majority of our current generation of graduate students are either 1.5- or (less commonly) second-generation Korean-Americans, or else Korean émigré scholars. We must try to ensure that the field of Korean Studies reaches out to a clientele that is at least broadly representative of the American population as a whole, perhaps through a creative rethinking of what affirmative action might mean for Asian Studies in an American academic context.
Korean Studies is also affected by the “rush toward the modern” that is occurring within Asian Studies more broadly, a move that threatens to marginalize coverage of the pre-modern period. This tendency to focus on modern and contemporary studies is exacerbated by the trend among universities to speed up normative time to PhD degrees (the number of years presumed necessary for a student to complete his/her degree). This speedup makes it all but impossible to thoroughly train students of pre-modern Korea in the basics of their field. Premodern specializations are in severe peril and, without careful nurturing, I fear there is a very real possibility they might not survive into the next generation.

Raising the Profile of Korean Studies
With the rise of China on the world stage over the last decade, Chinese Studies is resurgent again within American academe and has been enjoying most of the growth and expansion of resources within Asian Studies programs.
How might Korean Studies respond to these much larger related fields? First, we should encourage our colleagues in all areas of East Asian Studies to undertake broader regional approaches to their fields, as a way of subverting narrow nationalist studies. In my own field of Buddhist Studies, for example, scholars have commonly looked at the movement of religion and culture across boundaries, rather than solely within the narrow confines of single states. Because of the leading role played by the cultural and political center of China in developments within East Asia, scholars of China have assumed that regional developments within Buddhism would have begun first on the Chinese mainland, and from there spread throughout the rest of the region. But by taking a regional perspective on East Asian Buddhism, it is remarkable to find how many of the innovations presumed to come from China actually derive from Korea, or from expatriate Koreans who were personally active within the Chinese Buddhist tradition. This awareness is crucial if Korean Studies hopes to be treated as an equal with the academic behemoths of Chinese and Japanese Studies.
Second, with the study of pre-modern Korea we can conversely serve to enhance both Sinology and Japanology, and offer another reason why American institutions might be encouraged to foster expanded coverage of the pre-modern field. Let me give another example from my own field. During the Paekche, Unified Silla, and Koryo dynasties, Korea served as the virtual Phoenicia of East Asia. Its nautical prowess and well-developed sea lanes made the peninsula’s seaports the hubs of regional commerce. All along China’s eastern seacoast were permanent communities of Koreans, which were granted extraterritorial privileges and had their own autonomous political administration.
These communities served as way stations for the many foreigners – Koreans, Japanese, South and Southeast Asians – who were traveling into China to trade, study, or train. It was thus relatively easy for Koreans to travel to China or Japan, where they could serve as significant conduits for the transmission of cultural knowledge between the regions. Because Koreans played such an integral part in both premodern China and Japan, research involving pre-modern Korean materials can therefore do much to enhance the study of its two neighboring traditions.
Ultimately, though, it will be up to the current generation of scholars to sustain the intellectual excitement that our field has enjoyed in recent years. We must continue to publish new and innovative works of scholarship, reach out to a wider scholarly and public audience with our findings, and develop a new generation of scholars to carry the mantle of the field. Only by providing scholarly examples that are worthy of emulation can we hope that our field will develop as much over the next two decades as it has over the last two. Our chances of success will be great enhanced by the continued cooperation of our friends and colleagues at the Korea Foundation.

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