Associate Professor of Buddhist and Korean Studies
About
Current research interests and projects:
I work on Buddhism and the history of Korea. In my first book Buddhas and Ancestors (University of Washington Press, 2018), I challenge the tendency to attribute the changes that took place in mortuary customs and elite identity in fourteenth-century Korea to the corruption of Buddhism and the influence of Neo-Confucian ideology. Instead, I show how these changes and the consequent relegation of Buddhism to the margins of public authority resulted from the separation of religion and wealth in Korea. The larger aim of the book is to show that the notion of religious corruption cannot be safely used in all contexts.
Hoping to make sense of the exceptional transgressions that were recently brought to light in Korea, I also organized a conference on this subject and published the findings as an edited volume titled Transgression in Korea (University of Michigan Press, 2018). The essays collected in this volume challenge the popular conceptions of transgression as resistance to authority, the collapse of morality, and attempt at self-empowerment. Together, the essays illustrate how continuously changing efforts to define the relationship between transgression and authority made different ways of subject-formation in Korea possible.
I am currently engaged in some other research projects. The first project I hope to complete is a book manuscript on the history of reading habits and the development of new soteriological techniques in Song dynasty Chan Buddhism. I am also currently preparing a chapter on the economic history of the Koryŏ dynasty for the Cambridge History of Korea. In addition to these two projects, I plan to turn my ongoing research on the cultural history of wealth and weather and monastic economy during the Chosŏn period into a book.
Teaching interests:
At the undergraduate level I teach courses about premodern and modern Korean history and religion. I also teach courses about East Asian Buddhism, Zen, natural disasters in East Asia, contemporary controversies in Korea, great cities in Asia, and love in Korean literature and film. I also teach immersive learning courses, which take place in Seoul Korea.
http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/AHNBUD.html
http://weai.columbia.edu/weai-author-qa-juhn-ahn-buddhas-and-ancestors/
https://www.press.umich.edu/9273938/transgression_in_korea/?s=description
