About this Event
Speaker: Si Nae Park, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
Moderator: Jungwon Kim, King Sejong Associate Professor of Korean Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
Si Nae Park is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She received her PhD in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia. As a scholar of the literature and literary culture of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), she has growing interest in pre-Chosŏn periods, the reception of premodern Korean textual artifacts, and digital philology for premodern studies. Her research focuses on the comparative-historical study of reading, the inscriptional and acoustic interplays between Literary Sinitic and the vernacular, the intersection of literature and ideologies of script and language, and the relationship between literature and literary media. Park is the author of The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (Columbia University Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Score One for the Dancing Girl and Other Selections from the Kimun Ch'onghwa: A Story Collection from Nineteenth-Century Korea (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Materialities of the Book in Korea: Technologies, Inscriptions, and Reading Ecologies (Harvard University Asia Center, forthcoming).
Si Nae Park will deliver her lecture on Monday, November 16 at 4:00 PM.
Among the objects exhibited at the 1889 and 1900 Paris World Expositions were books from Korea that French visitors acquired as exotic collectibles. Having crossed borders, these books remained in Paris, where they became objects of description and interpretation. The information generated about them constituted one of the earliest systematically organized bodies of knowledge about Korea, with Maurice Courant’s three-volume Bibliographie coréenne (1894–1896) as a prime example. This process unfolded as Korea transitioned from a kingdom oriented toward the Sinographic Cosmopolis into a modern nation-state at the turn of the twentieth century. Treating the two Paris World Expositions as distinct yet interlinked events, this presentation examines how the books displayed there and the knowledge subsequently produced through descriptions of their material features contributed to the formation of the Korean literary past as an object of knowledge. It draws on three sources: (1) recent research that has clarified the provenance and material character of books now held in four Paris institutions—the Manuscripts Department at the Richelieu site of the National Library of France (BnF), the University Library of Languages and Civilizations (BULAC), the Cardinal Lemoine campus of the Collège de France, and the Guimet Museum; (2) Park’s own findings from site-specific, firsthand examinations of these books and records about them; and (3) the emergence of Korean literature as a field of study.
Event venue & nearby stays
420 W 118th St room 918, 420 West 118th Street, New York, United States
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