KF뉴스레터-Korean Studies at the University of Minnesota

Korean Studies at the University of Minnesota

With grant aid from the Korea Foundation, the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota has completed the search for a new assistant professor in Korean literature and culture,
who becomes the first professor of Korean Studies to have a full-time position at the university.

After a rigorous job search, the department has offered a position to Dr. Travis Workman (Ph.D. Cornell University 2008), who had just completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Los Angeles. This fall, Dr. Workman will begin his appointment and be teaching classes in Korean culture, modern Korean literature, and Korean cinema.

Extended Programs on Modern Korea
Dr. Workman has worked extensively on the cultural and literary history of Korea’s colonial period and during the 1950s and 1960s. His current project is a book-length manuscript based on his dissertation entitled Living for History: Culture, Time and Form in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea (1919-1945). His work with some of the cutting-edge scholars of cultural studies at Cornell University puts him at the vanguard of work in Korean Studies in the United States, and in the field of cultural studies in general.
Dr. Workman’s appointment comes at a time when interest in Korea has expanded tremendously in Minnesota. The university’s Korean language program has become one of the three largest programs in the country that focuses its attention upon non-heritage students, and is in fact the largest program of its kind in the American Midwest. Part of its success initially derived from the large population of Korean adoptees in the state of Minnesota (the largest number in the United States). Many university students who were born in Korea but grew up in adoptive families came to study the language in order to explore a cultural inheritance they had never known. More recently, however, students from all social and cultural backgrounds have come to enroll in language classes.
As a result, the program’s mission has developed not merely as a service to Korean-Americans and their children (as is true with many Korean programs in the United States) but as a vital way to spread the interest in and study of Korean culture in the United States and to foster international understanding. Much of the success of the program can also be attributed to the dynamic leadership of Dr. Hangtae Cho, who has brought it to its present scale within a decade. Enrollment in Korean courses at present total over 300 students each year; and Korean is the third-most popular Asian language taught at the university, immediately behind Chinese and Japanese.

New Korean Studies Scholar
Dr. Workman’s arrival will usher in an exciting new phase of Korean Studies at the university. Demand for courses on Korean subjects has increased greatly in the past several years, and the university had hitherto only been able to offer temporary postdoctoral positions (often supported by the Korea Foundation) to fulfill student interest. The department can now, with the arrival of Dr. Workman, offer a full specialization major in the study of Korea for the first time, to accompany the high quality of language instruction already present.
Moreover, Dr. Workman’s interest in the history of Korean cinema will allow him to work cooperatively with an extensive humanities faculty at the university who specialize in the study of film; three of the professors in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures now work with cinema studies and are equipped to train both undergraduate and graduate students in the study of East Asian cinema. The department is thus looking forward to the considerable contributions that Dr. Workman will bring to the Minnesota scholarly community in the coming years.

한국국제교류재단

Korean Studies at the University of Minnesota

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Korean Studies at the University of Minnesota

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