With the Korea Institute’s generous support, I was able to make significant progress in dissertation research in the summer of 2023. My dissertation project examines the history of the pharmaceutical industry and market in South Korea as a lens into changing notions of health, sickness, and cure across the dynamic two decades after Liberation in 1945. Previously, I conducted fieldwork in South Korea for a year between 2021-22. During this time, I encountered a joyful challenge: most of the primary sources for this topic were not yet digitized and accessible only in physical form in archives and libraries. I tried my best to scan everything, but could not finish the job entirely due to the sheer volume of material. So, for the past academic year, I had been eagerly waiting to go back to Korea to finish scanning and reading a couple of primary sources essential to my dissertation.
Thanks to the Korea Institute’s Graduate Summer Research Grant, I could finally make my much-awaited trip back to Seoul this summer and pick up where I left off. I took photographs of an important pharmaceutical trade newspaper for the years between 1958 and 1965. Now, I have a full set of articles for the 1954-1965 period that will serve as the backbone for my body chapters about the post-Korean War period. I also re-visited the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs’ registers for pharmacies and drug vendors stored at the National Archives in Sŏngnam. Over the past academic year, I learned more about the professionalization and varieties of pharmaceutical-related experts and vendors as well as the broader social, cultural, legal, and economic context in which they worked and lived. Upon reading these registers again this summer with such insights, I could approach them in a more critical way due. Finally, I discovered new primary sources at the National Archives about pharmaceutical organizations that I had not found in the previous year. All in all, this summer has been tremendously productive for my dissertation research. I finally feel like the fieldwork for my dissertation is complete—for now! With these materials, I am now even more prepared to focus on writing and working towards the completion of the dissertation. All the progress I made this past month was made possible by the Korea Institute’s support. I am always grateful for the Korea Institute’s continuous generosity for students’ research and wellbeing.