This year, I spent my summer researching for my thesis about the integration of North Korean refugees in South Korea. My work adopts a qualitative approach and tries to identify short and long-term challenges that prevent North Korean refugees to fully integrate into South Korean society after going through the 3-month long residential integration program in Hanawon. I furthermore am interested in seeing whether I can draw any conclusions from the long-term consequences of...
Faculty Project: Professor Haden Guest Faculty: Director, Harvard Film Archive; Senior Lecturer, Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies
This past summer, I was honored with the opportunity to serve as curatorial and research assistant to the Harvard Film Archive in the creation of a series of programs centered on the topics of Korean Diaspora and Korean Experimental Cinema, to be presented in virtual and in-person screenings this upcoming year. Rooted in the works of the great Korean-American artist Theresa...
Faculty Project: Aurality and Social Practices of Reading in Korean Literature Faculty: Associate Professor, Si Nae Park, Dept. of EALC
I applied for a Korea Institute Research Assistantship position with almost no hesitation. I was looking for summer work, and I knew I wanted to do something that dealt with Korean culture or history. As a Korean American raised by immigrant parents, I have always wanted to...
Faculty Project: Database of North Korean Hacker Activities Faculty: Prof. John Park, Director of the Korea Project and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center
Funded by the Korea Institute at Harvard University, I was a cohort member of the Summer Research Program led by Dr. John Park, director of the Korea Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. My research paper investigated the implications for the North Korean government adjusting for a post-Kim future...
Thanks to the generous support of the Korea Institute, I was able to participate in the 3-week short term online program at Korea University from June to July this summer. It was an intensive program conducted solely online, dedicated to the improvement of Korean speaking, reading and writing in a short period of time. The course focused on mastering vocabulary on complicated topics about society such as volunteer work, environmental issues, and health concerns, while practicing how to...
After completing my year of field research abroad in Korea, I returned to Cambridge during this past summer of 2021, and thanks to the generosity of the Korea Institute, I was able to begin the process of writing the dissertation chapters based on the sources I was able to gather while in Korea.
My dissertation topic is broadly on modern Korean political and intellectual history from liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 to the end of the Park Chung Hee dictatorship in 1979; specifically, I examine the content of both state-produced and public discourses and...
Thanks to the largess of the Korea Institute and the hospitality of Korea 4-H, I was able to travel to Seoul and conduct substantial dissertation research on the latter. 4-H was the largest rural youth club throughout most of the US-allied world after 1945, and the largest in the world was the Republic of Korea’s, which had more participants and a more extensive role than any other national 4-H. 4-H’s main purpose was educating rural youth not formally enrolled in schools with life skills, so its history is also a history of the shifting position of the countryside in a quickly...
My doctoral research interests are in blindness and technology in South Korea. I was wondering whether and how the emphasis on technological innovation in Korean society and policy leads to improve the data accessibility and living convenience of people with disabilities, specifically blind people. I hope to examine in what aspects and why blind people experience difficulties in daily life.
Thanks to the 2021 KI Graduate Summer Research Grant program, I could begin my preliminary research with learning braille. This summer, I learned braille not only through a ‘traditional way...