Korea Colloquium
Dahye Kim
Assistant Professor of Korean Literature and Culture, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Northwestern University
Dahye Kim is an assistant professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. Her research bridges modern Korean literature with the global history of media and technology, examining how literary forms, genres, and practices of writing evolve across changing media environments. Her work brings literary studies into conversation with media theory and the cultural history of communication technologies in Korea and beyond, focusing especially on the 20th century and the Cold War. She investigates how shifts from typewriters to computers, from script reform to digitization, and from print literacy to electronic inscription reshape both the possibilities of literary art and the textures of everyday writing. While grounded in Korean literature and culture, she also develops broader critical perspectives on media and technology, especially the cultural and theoretical frameworks that shape communication technologies globally.
Chaired by Si Nae Park, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
Abstract:
Pok Kŏ-il (1947– ), the SF writer and libertarian polemicist, became infamous in 1990s Korea for proposing that English be established as a second official language—an argument that critics denounced as a betrayal of national autonomy and linguistic identity. Yet Pok’s proposal was not simply a product of 1990s globalization fever or his own attachment to venues like The Economist. Rather, it drew upon a much longer history in which language was imagined as an instrument, something to be optimized for efficiency rather than celebrated as a vessel of national spirit. This talk situates Pok within two intertwined genealogies: modern projects of linguistic utilitarianism that stretch back to Mori Arinori’s Meiji-era promotion of English, and the cybernetic reengineering of Korean writing during the Cold War. I show how Pok’s understanding of written language echoes the mid-century attempt to remake Hangul into a rationalized, machine-compatible script—visible in typewriter design, information-processing experiments, and in the emerging theories of communication and control crystallized in Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and its conceptual antecedents. Reading Pok alongside this technopolitical history reveals that the “modern Korean language” is not merely a cultural artifact but an outcome of infrastructural, computational, and imperial entanglements.
Generously supported by the Sunshik Min Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Korean Literature at the Korea Institute, Harvard University
LOCATION:(In-Person) Thomas Chan-Soo Kang Room (S050), CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260226T213000Z DTEND:20260226T230000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR