King's History Professor Adam Bohnet receives major funding ($151,000) for two research projects

The Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies has granted funding to “Breaking Down the Walls of a Single-Country Focus: A New Global Paradigm for the Study of Choson Korea," organized by Dr. Namlin Hur of the University of British Columbia. Dr. Adam Bohnet from the Department of History at King’s has received this funding for his contribution to the project, a monograph tentatively entitled, Foreign Lineages in Late Chos?n Korea and the publication of five articles over the course of the next five years.  The Lab aims to establish a new paradigm for the study of Chos?n Korea’s interactions with its neighbors by exploring the flow of people, ideas, products, and institutions from a comparative and transnational perspective. Specifically, topics which the Lab members will examine include diplomacy, war, trade and piracy, ethnic perceptions, border disputes, diaspora, acculturation, and religious culture. In positioning Chos?n Korea within the global history of East Asian civilizations and beyond, the Lab also pays attention to the origins, practices and legacies of these border-crossing issues that distinguished Chos?n Korea from others. At the same time, the Lab will serve as a hub of education designed to training graduate students working on Chos?n Korea’s transnational issues.

Funded by the Academy of Korean Studies, this three year project “Works of Late Chos?n Dynasty Korea” is under the direction of Dr. George L. Kallander, Syracuse University. Dr. Bohnet’s contribution will be an annotated translation of the Chibong yus?l (The Topical Discourses of Chibong)  by Yi Sugwang (1563-1628). This project introduces to English-language readers Korea’s early modern era through the translation and annotation of important texts from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.  The four texts selected from the list of 100 Korean Classics reflect the complex and vibrant nature of early modern Korean society.  This period was a time of realignment of Korean identity in the aftermath of the Manchu conquests of Northeast Asia, followed by economic, social, bureaucratic, and artistic developments over two centuries of growth and steady change. These annotated translations, and the scholarly studies that will accompany them, will give the English-language world access to historical and artistic developments in Korea during this important era, long before the country became known to the West.