James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies
Greater Philadelphia Area Korean Studies Conference | November 14, 2025
On November 14, 2025, scholars from Philadelphia and beyond gathered at the University of Pennsylvania's James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies for the 2025 Greater Philadelphia Area Korean Studies Conference. The Conference, now in its third year, aims to bring Korean Studies scholars in the Greater Philadelphia area together to collaborate and network. The presence of both old and new faces was a welcome sight, signaling not only the sustained strength of our existing ties but also the exciting growth of our community.
Participants in diverse fields including political science, history, musicology, literature, religion, and sociology gathered this year to share their research on a variety of issues facing Korea. In his opening remarks, Hyunjoon Park, Director of the Kim Center, welcomed participants, noting that "crossing [disciplinary] boundaries tends to be discouraged ... One way to overcome such barriers is to come together and learn from each other," allowing scholars to borrow from different disciplines to gain crucial interdisciplinary insights. Jae Won Edward Chung, Assistant Professor of Korean Literature at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, echoed this sentiment, stating that the cross-disciplinary nature of the conference has made it "a generative and interesting process." For him, the dialogue is an opportunity to "learn from constantly rearticulating your ideas for different groups of people."
Learning Across Disciplines
The first session of the conference focused on the theme of hybridity in South Korean music and film. Jiwon Kwon, doctoral student in Ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania, leveraged her expertise as a trained Jazz Pianist to show how incorporation of various genres and characteristics in K-pop makes it "not a mere imitation of Western music but a distinct creative form of musical production." Helena Hazel, graduate student at the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University, explored emptiness and multiple forms of hybridity in the film Resurrection of the Little Match Girl by Jang Sung-Woo.
Another session featured social scientists studying labor and politics in transition. Sejin Um, Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kim Center, explored the uneven distribution of passion in work and alternative meaning-making strategies that white-collar workers in South Korea engage in. Joan Cho, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and Government at Wesleyan University, showed how the nationalist axis of party competition in South Korea has shaped left-right politics in ways that have undermined the quality of partisan competition in the democratic period.
In the final session on contested narratives, Jae Won Edward Chung shared his essay that calls attention to the relationalities that sustain the production of translation. Hannah Kim, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware, presented chapters from her book on how transnational communities helped shape American perceptions of Korea and Koreans during Japanese occupation. Minjung Noh, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion, Culture & Society at Lehigh University, discussed how feminist and evangelical Christian movements in Korea engaged in boundary policing after December 3, 2024.
Attendees also had an opportunity to become familiar with Penn Libraries' resources supporting the study of Korea. In a tour at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, Brian Vivier, Director of the Zilberman Family Center for Global Collections, showcased Penn's Korean studies collection, ranging from rare historical and North Korean materials to the Global Comics Collection.
Boundaries, Authenticity, and Audience
Hyunjoon Park summarized one recurring theme of the conference as "dichotomous boundaries between different groups and activities. These boundaries are present in all societies, but what makes Korea distinct or interesting is that, in different historical periods, different boundaries emerge as dominant ... Boundaries intersect with other social forces in interesting ways ... making it different from European or other contexts."
The related theme of authenticity featured prominently in several of the presentations. Jiwon Kwon stated that her project is driven by the question of what is authentic in a global era, suggesting authenticity is more about politics and hegemony than actual purity. This idea resonated with Jae Won Edward Chung, who reflected on the anxiety in creativity and authorship in terms of translation.
For Emily Noh, AKS Postdoctoral Fellow in Korean Studies at the Kim Center, “when you're aware the audience is more diverse, you bring in more contexts" because having a diverse audience forces us to reckon with assumptions that we would otherwise take for granted regarding how to approach a certain topic or concept. Other participants also noted how the diverse audiences of scholarship on Korea make their work more challenging and more exciting at the same time. Minjung Noh commended the Kim Center for taking on the work of translation by "speaking to a diverse audience including the Korean diaspora, as well as those not familiar with the Korean context."
Joan Cho pointed out that all of the presentations engaged with concepts that are not unique to Korea, like precarity, work, feminism, and evangelicalism, while also pointing out unique aspects of the Korean context. "We don't want to stop at uniqueness, we want to engage back," she concluded.