Michigan Korean Studies Summer Institute

Theme: Literature and Korea’s Twentieth Century
Dates: June 22-June 27, 2025
Location: Ann Arbor Campus, University of Michigan

Program Overview

The Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan is pleased to announce the third Michigan Korean Studies Summer Institute (MiKSSI), to be held in Ann Arbor from June 22-27, 2025. PhD students in any discipline whose research concerns Korea are encouraged to apply. This one-week residential intensive program, to be conducted in Korean and English without interpretation, will focus on collaborative learning, collective thinking, and critical agenda-setting around a key issue in Korean Studies.

This year’s theme is Literature and Korea’s Twentieth Century. For a few short weeks in November 2024, Han Kang’s Nobel Prize announcement was saluted as Korean literature’s long-awaited moment of arrival as world literature, an achievement that had eluded an earlier generation of writings shackled by the national burdens of Korea’s twentieth century. The political sequence that enveloped Korea in December 2024, however, rapidly changed the trajectory of how Han Kang would be celebrated within Korea. The unforeseen coincidence of the global recognition accorded to a Korean writer and the declaration of martial law by the country’s president has had the effect of bringing into sharp focus a view of the writer that was seen largely as obsolete in contemporary Korean society: the writer as the conscience of her times. Throughout the twentieth century, Korean literature had functioned in excess of its primary modes of representing social reality or constructing aesthetic worlds, to emerge as the privileged medium of shaping consciousness about the times while manifesting the conscience of the times. Han Kang’s literature has renewed a call to examine this essence of the twentieth-century Korean writer.

With this observation as the point of departure, MiKSSI 2025 will invite a group of leading Korean scholars who specialize in modern Korean literature to join remotely to offer sustained reflections on the theme of literature and Korea’s twentieth century from multiple perspectives and across genres. These online seminars will be conducted in Korean. The seminars will be followed by in-person discussion sessions that further dissect, problematize, and elaborate, the critical issues raised. Lead faculty instructors in residence will conduct these in-person discussion sessions in English, and also offer additional seminars on their own research. Topics to be explored at the institute include colonial and Cold War histories, gender and class, modernity and nationalism, language and textuality, national poiesis and subject making, democracy and resistance, and ethics and aesthetics of violence. These topics will be situated within regional, global, and comparative contexts.

Lead Faculty Instructors (in residence)

Kyeong-Hee Choi is Associate Professor of Modern Korean Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Chair of the Committee on Korean Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research analyzes the relationship between the culture of publication and the historical experiences of modern Koreans, including effects of Japanese imperial rule on the citizens of Korea and the complex processes of democratization that took place throughout the Cold War period. In 2008, Professor Choi founded North American Workshop on Korean Literature (NAOKOL), which was relaunched as Korean Literature Association (KLA) in 2014.

Sunyoung Park is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Gender Studies, and Director of the Institute for Korean Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the editor of Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction (Kaya Press, 2019), the editor of Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea (University of Michigan Press, 2019), and the author of The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015). Her current projects include a monograph on science fiction. Professor Park was the chair of the Committee on Korean Studies of North East Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (2017-2020) and the president of KLA (2022-2024).

Seminar Leaders (remote)

Seo, Young-Chae is Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations at Seoul National University. He specializes in the modern Korean novel, critical theory, and comparative literature. The recipient of multiple honors including the 2024 Daesan Prize for Literary Criticism, Seo helped found the literary quarterly Munhak Dongne in 1994. His books on Korean literature include Novel’s Destiny (1995), Ethics of Literature (2005), Power of Mimesis (2012), and Guilt and Shame (2017).

Kwon, Boduerae is Professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Korea University and the author of The Night of March First, winner of the 2021 Korean Publication Culture Award. A specialist of twentieth-century Korean literature and culture, Kwon has more recently explored the relationship between Korean literature and world literature, and world literature within North Korean literature. She is the author of The Origins of Modern Korean Novel (2000), The Age of Yeonae (2003), New Fiction: Politics and Language (2014), and co-author of Interrogating 1960 (2012).

Lee, Hye Ryoung is Professor in the Academy of East Asian Studies at Sungkyunkwan University. She has published extensively on Korean literature of the colonial era, especially on the works of Yŏm Sang-sŏp, and on such topics as censorship, feminist critique, labor literature, and the 1980s. She is the editor of The Collected Works of Yŏm Sang-sŏp (2013-2014), and co-author of Literary History After Literary History (2013), Empire of Censorship (2016) and Women of Two Chosŏns: Body, Language, Disposition (2016).

Son, Youkyung is Professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Seoul National University. She specializes in socialism in literature, the feminist postmodern, the body, and the avant-garde. She is the author of multiple studies, including The Structure of Feeling in Proletarian Literature (2012), The Melancholic Socialist (2016), and Osmosis of Words (2021).

Kang, Dong Ho is Professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Inha University. He was awarded the 2023 Young Artist Award by the National Academy of Arts, Republic of Korea. He serves on the editorial board of the literary quarterly Munhak kwa Sahoe, and has published articles on modern Korean poetry and poetics, post-democratization literature and discourse, and literary aestheticism. He is the author of The Square of Times Past (2022).

About the Summer Institute from the 2024 cohort

“MiKSSI is an extraordinarily rare opportunity to find intellectual community in Korean Studies and gather for intensive study that can hardly be found in other places, in my experience. I wholeheartedly recommend this program for future participants.”

“MiKSSI was an inspiring week of learning and connection. I saw how it can serve a different yet important purpose for participants in different stages of the PhD: as an opportunity to solicit advice from mentors and peers toward refining your research in its early stages; or for those lost in particularities, an opportunity to gain an expanded context on Korean studies and its stakes.”

“I came out of the institute with such a rich understanding of the stakes of Korean politics today and the history that preceded it. I was also greatly moved by Song Soyeon 선생님’s presentations on the history of maternal feminism/activism in Korea and the fabricated spies cases. It was an invaluable experience to attend MiKSSI 2024.”

Applications

All applications should be submitted using this form.

Interested students should prepare and submit the following documents, in addition to one confidential letter of recommendation from a faculty member from the institution where the student is currently enrolled, preferably the applicant’s advisor:

1. A Letter of Intent of no more than two pages describing current scholarly interests and how participation in the Summer Institute would contribute to the applicant’s academic plans. The statement should include information about courses taken in relevant fields if any.
2. A current curriculum vitae
3. A sample of recent writing

Letters of recommendation should be submitted by the advisor in pdf format to ncks.applications@umich.edu with “SUMMER INSTITUTE - Letter of Recommendation” in the subject line.

The final deadline for all submissions is March 15, 2025 at 11:59 pm.

Admissions decisions will be announced within the month of March.

Tuition & Financial Aid

Tuition is waived for all participants in the institute. Lodging will be provided to participants, as well as a modest stipend for meals and incidental expenses, with the generous support of the Academy of Korean Studies.

Students are encouraged to seek funding from their home institutions for transportation to Ann Arbor.

Past Summer Institutes

MiKSSI 2023 | The Global Korean War

MiKSSI 2024 | Democracy and Gender