Thanks to the generous support of the Korea Institute, I spent three months in South Korea conducting research on my dissertation project, “From Warfare to Welfare: Security Policy and Military Urbanism in Chosŏn Korea,” a study of military institutions and their impact on commerce, urban expansion and social change in the late Chosŏn period (1600-1910). My summer research focused mainly on examining the Jangseogak Archives, but also included field trips to Kyŏngsang and Ch'ungch'ŏng provinces and a three-week translation workshop at the Academy of Korean Studies.
In July and August, I made progress with my dissertation research while working at the Jangseogak Archives. My prospective dissertation traces the evolution of Chosŏn’s security policy and its socio-economic spin-offs, particularly the process of ‘military urbanism’: after the seventeenth century, new military needs prioritized capital defense, filled Seoul with soldiers and their families, and stimulated urbanization and commerce. This summer, I studied materials at the Jangseogak Archives that greatly substantiated the project. Particularly important were the Records of the Central Military Garrison (軍營謄錄), a collection of military logs kept by Chosŏn’s capital armies for almost three centuries (1593-1882). I procured copies of the entire corpus and joined a weekly reading group with experts at the archive; we read tough passages from the Records of the Central Military Garrison that are written with clerk’s script and in cursive, and took turns presenting our interpretations.
During my stay at the Jangseogak Archives, I also attended a translation workshop offered by the Academy of Korean Studies. For three weeks, I joined the advanced hanmun class under the tutorship of Professor Song Jaeyoon at McMaster University. With other (post)doctoral students who study East Asian history, we read and translated into English old documents from the Chosŏn period such as royal instructions, literati writings, socio-economic documents and legal cases. We uploaded these translations online in hopes of promoting new primary source readings for college courses on Korean history taught in English.
In addition to archival research, I went on three field trips to southern parts of Korea. In June, I attended a field trip to Kyŏngsang Province jointly organized by Harvard University and Kyung Pook National University, during which we visited private academies, Buddhist temples and ancestral homes of local literati in the region. Later in July, I deepened my familiarity with many of these sites via another field trip organized by the Academy of Korean Studies. Finally, in early August, I visited historical sites in Ch'ungch'ŏng province, namely ancestral homes of Yi Sam (李森, 1677-1735) and his teacher Yun Chŭng (尹拯, 1629-1714). While meeting with descendants of these families, I focused on investigating Yi Sam, an eminent military official who served as commander of various capital armies, enjoyed a special relationship with King Yŏngjo, and authored books and maps related to border defense. In the upcoming academic year, I look forward to bringing sources and insights from this summer trip to bear on my dissertation prospectus.
Image of a portrait of Yi Sam