Hello, my name is Gina Kim. I am an associate professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, specializing in teaching and research of Korean literature and cultural studies. I am in the department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, which is part of the newly established School of Global Studies and Languages. Currently, I am the Korean sector representative, as well as the Korean advisor for the Korean minor.
And in the coming years, we are in the process of developing a Korean major for those students who are interested in not only minoring in Korean but majoring in Korean. I am also the faculty and residents of Kalapuya and Lilly Hall. What this means is that I live on campus with the students in the halls, especially in particular the Kalapuya and Lilly Hall. As a faculty in residence, what I do is I advise students, I mentor students outside of the academic setting.
In this way, I see the everyday lives of the students that will be coming to the University of Oregon and interacting with them through informal study breaks as well as formal lectures and other activities. But before I begin, To tell you more about what I do here, let me tell you a little bit about how I got here. And so this is where I think about my experience of becoming a professor of Korean literature and culture, and I label it as my Lucian moment. And then, of course, I will also be thinking about and talking about why literature, why do we need to study literature in this day and age, in the 21st century. where much of the emphasis is on technology, sciences, and mathematics.
So I begin by introducing you to this figure named Lu Xun. He is considered to be the father of modern Chinese literature. He is a man of great importance who lived in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
As the historical period goes, Like many other intellectuals from that period, Lu Xun also went to Japan to study. And the topic or the subject that he decided to study was medicine. Medicine was a modern subject. It was a subject that many intellectuals were drawn to at that time. However, while he was in Japan studying medicine, he came across in one of his classes during one of the breaks.
where the professor showed images of what was happening in the world. And this was during 1904, 1905, 1906, which was during the Russo-Japanese War. The image that Lu Xun encountered was of war battleground in which he saw the Japanese soldiers decapitating Chinese soldiers.
And he was very shocked. and traumatized by this image, he realized that in this image many of the bystanders were Chinese soldiers and other Chinese people who were just looking on at this very atrocious act without being able to do anything about it. And as a result of this incident, Lu Xun decided to quit medicine and decided to return to China and become a writer. And thus he became a writer of short stories, novels, and essays. To this day, Lu Xun is known as one of the most important intellectuals and writers of the modern period.
I bring Lu Xun up because I had a very similar trajectory. My trajectory to becoming a professor of Korean literature was not straightforward, but it meandered. That is, I actually also went to study medicine. and then decided that, well, I'm not sure if medicine is going to be able to heal the nation. Although my experience was not as lofty and is not having as much of an impact as Lu Xun's is, I still saw that literature rather than medicine was a way that I can contribute to the society and also engage in the process of thinking about the healing process of racial injustice.
social disparity and economic disparity. One of the reasons that why I came to this conclusion was because I went to college or medical school during a time period when we saw lots of racial discrimination that's happening, especially between the Black American communities and Asian American communities. And I also saw that there was a lot of Asian hate crime that was taking place at that time.
And for me, literature gave me the source to see across differences, to read about different people and different cultures and different histories. And thus, I came to the conclusion that I must study literature. And one of the ways that it can contribute to the healing of these racial injustices and social disparities will be through becoming a professor of literature.
As a result, of course, of my interest in thinking about cross-cultural differences and reading across different languages, my first book involved the study of both East Asian literatures, across the Japanese colonial period. That is my first book, Compare Taiwan and Korea during the Japanese colonial period, and ask the question, how were their experiences? How different were their experiences?
Because much of the scholarship that I have found was that people were saying Taiwan and Korea were, and Korean people and Taiwanese people were having such different experiences and thus it drew those people apart. Whereas I was asking well to what extent was their experience really really different? Thus I began the journey of looking at urban culture and urban spaces and works written by modernist writers at that time.
What I found however was quite contradictory to the previous works that have been produced. In fact, what I noticed was that people, whether they were living in Taiwan or living in Korea in the early 20th century, they were both very concerned about their sense of self, their identity within this context in which their identities were being oppressed and in the context where their languages were being suppressed. So that was my first book.
Currently, I am finishing up a second book. which is about colonial Korean radio. And here is where I think I am very interested in bringing in more interdisciplinary methodologies.
That is, I want to see the technology of radio, this very new technology that came into its circulation globally in the 1920s, and how this radio worked to bring about new aesthetic forms and new ways of... being able to voice people's ideas. And thus I am studying radio dramas, which is not the most elite or serious kind of literary work, but seeing how voices of the everyday people are being performed and being presented through this radio technology that allows one's ideas to travel globally, not just within the Korean Peninsula, but to the colonies. to the empire and even to the west. Which then brings me to my current project which is asking about this phenomenon of global globalization of Korean literature and culture.
I am very interested in seeing these kinds of exchanges that were taking place between not just Korea and Japan which was happening in the colonial period but all over the world. Koreans were traveling from Korea to Mexico to Germany to the U.S. and to Hawaii and I'm interested in seeing how these kinds of travels and transactions led to again cultural mixing, cultural crossings and of course forms that allow people to express these kinds of new identities. So my Courses that I teach are very much related to, of course, my intellectual interest. And one of the courses that I am currently teaching is Korean Popular Culture and Transnationalism.
I am currently finishing up this course in the winter term. This course is a course that is open to anyone. You do not have to have had experience in taking classes on Korea before. or you do not have to have Korean language ability. It is really open to anyone on campus.
And in fact, many of my students come from the business school, the school of education, the design school, and it really brings together a very interesting group of students who have interests not just in Korea, but also in different aspects of Korea, such as business, such as art, and such as education. This course explores the question of how did Korea, and especially South Korean popular culture, become so popular? and global in the 21st century. As some of you might know, in the past 15 years or so, Korean popular culture in the form of popular music, film, and television dramas, and webtoons, fashion, beauty, food, have really taken to the world and have become an important and perhaps very marketable and profitable cultural commodity. This course then explores and questions how did this happen why is it so important and why is it connected to the ways that we understand politics economy and society and cultural formations in addition to this popular culture course i teach a cross-cultural course on east asia and this course is something that i'll be teaching in the coming spring term and it's called Cultures of Protest in Modern East Asia.
This course takes up the question of what did people and especially artists, writers, and performers do in order to bring about political change and social changes. Many times we have this assumption that art and literature are far removed from our everyday lives, that it is isolated and we only read literature and study art in the classroom. However, this class tries to show that it is not that case, but that art and literature is very much part of the way that we engage with the social process and the political changes that we are experiencing. This course is, again, open to any student.
whether they have had previous experience in any form of East Asian history or culture or art, as well as those students who do not have any background in East Asian languages. I want to now maybe shift a little bit to talk about what we do specifically in this class to learn. And many of my classes are, I guess what I would consider, A little bit non-traditional in the way I evaluate and assess students'learning or their success. Of course, I give traditional quizzes and exams, midterms and final exams, but I'm more interested in the way how students have learned, what they have learned, can be applied out to the outside once they go in to do their internships or to find a job after their graduation.
Thus, I am interested in seeing how their knowledge can be applied to, for example, bringing their knowledge alive in making, for example, posters. So, for example, in the cultures of protest class, we make posters that might actually be used for a social movement. Or in the case of the popular culture class, since Korean popular culture has become so popular, and especially in the way that it's being disseminated, we make podcasts to see how we can actually become not only consumers of popular culture, but producers of popular culture.
And then lastly, I guess what I would like to emphasize is while you are here, I would love for you to see you in some of our language classes. I think language learning is essential to college life, especially because once you graduate and go into the working world, you are not going to have as much time to learn a language. Learning a language takes lots of time. It takes dedication. And once you graduate, you're going to become even busier.
And college years, the four years or three years or five years that you are here, are going to be this safe and incubating space in which you can learn and dedicate yourself to learning a language. I would also encourage you to Study abroad, whether it is in Asia, Europe, or South America or Africa. Again, I think college years is a wonderful time in which you can take a step back from your own campus to be exposed to different cultures and different academic settings. And then, as I have been very invested in providing opportunities for students outside of the academic environment, the campus environment, I encourage you to explore opportunities to do internships abroad as well as within the community. And then once you graduate, I am also here to see where you are going to go.
That is, I am here to advise you on in not only internships but perhaps you're interested in studying in graduate school. and obtaining scholarship to study in graduate school. And then lastly, one of the things I love seeing is having and doing is having conversations with students outside of my classroom. That is when students visit me during my office hours or making an appointment outside of my office hours. And here in these office hours, I don't necessarily want students to only talk about the class materials, but to really share with me the ways that this class might be applicable to their life or to other classes that they might be taking.
So I encourage students to always visit their professors during their office hours to talk about the extracurricular activities, their interest in their career dreams, as well as, of course, everyday things that are happening to them. This is one of the best ways that students get to know their professors and also to build a professional relationship and a mentorship relationship. And one of the ways that this can happen is, of course, to take the course with this professor, but take another course with the professor so that you can start building the relationship. But as I said, it can also happen outside of the formal. course environment.
So in conclusion, I would like to welcome you again to the University of Oregon and I look very much forward to meeting all of you in the coming academic year. Please visit me during my office hours or in Kalapuya and Lilly Hall or email me and I would love to be able to meet you and talk with you more about not only East Asian Studies but other aspects of University of Oregon's life. Thank you.