Washington University Press Search Results Page

Korean Pop Culture beyond Asia

Race and Reception

By David C. Oh, Benjamin Min Han

Showcases the dynamism of cross-cultural engagement with Korean media

Korean media has exploded in popularity across the globe in the past decade: BTS and other K-pop groups have packed stadiums, Parasite garnered record-breaking critical success, The...

Late Industrialization, Tradition, and Social Change in South Korea

By Yong-Chool Ha

Examines how primary social ties fueled economic growth

South Korea's rapid industrialization occurred with the rise of powerful chaebǒl (family-owned business conglomerates) that controlled vast swaths of the nation's economy. Leader Park Chung Hee's sense of...

Seeds of Control

Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea

By David Fedman. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Conservation as a tool of colonialism in early twentieth-century Korea

Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests....

Park Dae Sung

Ink Reimagined

By Sunglim Kim

Contemporary Korean artist Park Dae Sung (b. 1945) works in the traditional medium of ink painting while transforming familiar Korean landscapes with his modern and imaginative interpretations of the natural world. Park, who lost his...

Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan

Elite Graffiti in Premodern Korea

By Maya K. H. Stiller

Honorable Mention for the 2024 James B. Palais Prize for English-Language Scholarly books published on Korea from the Association for Asian Studies

Winner of the 2022 Patricia Buckley Ebrey Prize sponsored by the American Historical Association

An...

The Power of the Brush

Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea

By Hwisang Cho

Finalist for the inaugural ACLS Open Access Book Prize

Honorable Mention, 2022 James B. Palais Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS)

Honorable Mention, 28th Annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book (MLA)

Shortlisted...

Greening East Asia

The Rise of the Eco-developmental State

By Ashley Esarey, Mary Alice Haddad, Joanna I. Lewis, Stevan Harrell

A timely collection examining a diverse region’s environmental shifts

East Asia hosts a fifth of the world’s population and consumes over half the world’s coal, a quarter of its petroleum products, and a tenth of its...

One Left

A Novel

By Kim Soom. Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Foreword by Bonnie Oh

A powerful tale of trauma and endurance that transformed a nation’s understanding of Korean comfort women

During the Pacific War, more than 200,000 Korean girls were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers. They lived in...

Peace Corps Volunteers and the Making of Korean Studies in the United States

By Seung-kyung Kim, Michael Robinson

The bonds forged in Peace Corps service shaped the field of Korean studies

From 1966 through 1981 the Peace Corps sent more than two thousand volunteers to South Korea, to teach English and provide healthcare. A...

Korean Skilled Workers

Toward a Labor Aristocracy

By Hyung-A Kim

South Korea’s triumphant development has catapulted the country’s economy to the eleventh largest in the world. Large family-owned conglomerates, or chaebŏls, such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, have become globally preeminent manufacturing brands. Yet Korea’s...

International Impact of Colonial Rule in Korea, 1910-1945

By Yong-Chool Ha

In recent years, discussion of the colonial period in Korea has centered mostly on the degree of exploitation or development that took place domestically, while international aspects have been relatively neglected. Colonial discourse, such as...

The Shaman's Wages

Trading in Ritual on Cheju Island

By Kyoim Yun

Breaking from previous scholarship on Korean shamanism, which focuses on mansin of mainland Korea, The Shaman’s Wages offers the first in-depth study of simbang, hereditary shamans on Cheju Island off the peninsula’s southwest coast. In...

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

By Erik Mobrand

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In...

Beyond Death

The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea

By Charles R. Kim, Jungwon Kim, Hwasook B. Nam, Serk-Bae Suh

Suicide and martyrdom are closely intertwined with Korean social and political processes. In this first book-length study of the evolving ideals of honorable death and martyrdom from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910) to contemporary South Korea,...

Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets

The Culture of Objects in Late Chosŏn Korean Art

By Sunglim Kim

The social and economic rise of the chungin class (“middle people” who ranked between the yangban aristocracy and commoners) during the late Chosŏn period (1700–1910) ushered in a world of materialism and commodification of painting...

A New Middle Kingdom

Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Chosŏn Korea (1700–1850)

By J. P. Park

Historians have claimed that when social stability returned to Korea after devastating invasions by the Japanese and Manchus around the turn of the seventeenth century, the late Chosŏn dynasty was a period of unprecedented economic...

Buddhas and Ancestors

Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea

By Juhn Y. Ahn

Two issues central to the transition from the Koryo to the Choson dynasty in fourteenth-century Korea were social differences in ruling elites and the decline of Buddhism, which had been the state religion. In this...

The Emotions of Justice

Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Choson Korea

By Jisoo M. Kim

The Choson state (1392–1910) is typically portrayed as a rigid society because of its hereditary status system, slavery, and Confucian gender norms. However, The Emotions of Justice reveals a surprisingly complex picture of a judicial...

Spaces of Possibility

In, Between, and Beyond Korea and Japan

By Clark W. Sorensen, Andrea Gevurtz Arai

Spaces of Possibility, which arose from a 2012 conference held at the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities, engages with spaces in, between, and beyond the national borders of Japan and Korea. Some...

Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea

By Gi-Wook Shin

The period from 1876 to 1946 in Korea marked a turbulent time when the country opened its market to foreign powers, became subject to Japanese colonialism, and was swept into agricultural commercialization, industrialization, and eventually...