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New Books in Korean Studies

New Books in Korean Studies

By: New Books Network
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 This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/korean-studiesNew Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism Science Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Re-examining the Women’s Movement in Cold War South Korea and Beyond

    Re-examining the Women’s Movement in Cold War South Korea and Beyond
    Jan 9 2026
    In the past decade, feminism has become one of the heated topics in public debate in South Korea. Feminism is embraced by activists, attacked in election campaigns, and increasingly framed as the source of conflict between men and women. In this episode, Outi Luova talks to Katri Kauhanen to trace the historicity behind the contemporary debates and to ask why the history of the women’s movement still matters today. Drawing on insights from Kauhanen’s recently published dissertation, titled Re-examining the Women’s Movement in Cold War South Korea and Beyond: The History of the Korean National Council of Women, we discuss the history of the women’s movement in authoritarian era South Korea through the lens of the Council, conceptualize Cold War feminism and consider how the Cold War era archives of the international women’s movement can also serve the research on Asian women’s activism. Our guest, Katri Kauhanen from the Center of East Asian Studies, University of Turku, is a Doctor of Social Sciences whose work explores Korean history, history of the women’s movements and the transnational networks and discourses through which women organized, collaborated, and articulated agency during the Cold War. Outi Luova is a senior university lecturer at the Center of East Asian Studies, University of Turku, Finland. Link to the thesis The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) and Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/korean-studies
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    26 mins
  • Serk-Bae Suh, "Against the Chains of Utility: Sacrifice and Literature in 1970s and 1980s South Korea" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)

    Serk-Bae Suh, "Against the Chains of Utility: Sacrifice and Literature in 1970s and 1980s South Korea" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)
    Jan 7 2026
    Against the Chains of Utility: Sacrifice and Literature in 1970s and 1980s South Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2025) explores literary texts that countered the prevailing rhetoric of South Korea’s exploitative developmental state. These texts capture moments of anti-utilitarian sacrifice, and include Kim Hyŏn’s critical essays, Pak Sangnyung’s monumental novel A Study of Death (1975), and Ko Chŏnghǔi’s poems about the Passion of Jesus. In Against the Chains of Utility, Serk-Bae Suh challenges the notion of utilitarian sacrifice, which continues to pervade every aspect of Korean society. He argues that any act of sacrifice for a higher cause is inherently utilitarian, regardless of whether its motives are morally sound or questionable. Such sacrifices establish a circuit of exchange, where sacrifice is valued solely based on its ability to achieve an end. To counter this instrumentalization, anti-utilitarian sacrifice must exist as a means without an end. Suh posits that literature’s relevance to society lies in this seemingly nihilistic sacrifice, viewing literature not as a proxy for politics but as the art of imagination in language. Dr. Serk-Bae Suh is an associate professor in East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He primarily studies modern Korean literature, and the underlying concern that guides his research issues from the inescapable human condition of being with others. He is also the author of Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s. View his university profile at https://www.faculty.uci.edu/pr.... Buy Against the Chains of Utility: Sacrifice and Literature in 1970s and 1980s South Korea: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/tit... About the host: Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at leslie.hickman@emory.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/korean-studies
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)

    Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)
    Dec 26 2025
    After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program which now has the capability to strike American cities with weapons of mass destruction. In Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea (Yale UP, 2025), Joel S. Wit explains why US efforts to contain North Korea have not worked and gives readers a front-row seat to the policy debates, diplomatic deals, and secret talks between Washington and Pyongyang. Wit, a former State Department official, takes readers to the front lines of nuclear negotiations and recounts how perilously close the United States and North Korea have come, on various occasions, to nuclear confrontation. Based on more than three hundred interviews with officials in Washington, Beijing, and Seoul, as well as with the author’s contacts in Pyongyang, this book chronicles how six American presidents have approached the problem of North Korea.Wit points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for the failure to halt North Korea’s march to build a nuclear arsenal, since it was under their successive tenures that Pyongyang acquired the ability to threaten every city in North America. Wit also offers an unparalleled portrait of Kim Jong Un that refutes his caricature as impulsive and illogical. Like his father and his grandfather, Kim is a ruthless despot but also a canny and informed negotiator determined to secure his dictatorship’s future by exploring diplomacy or, failing that, by building a nuclear arsenal. Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book which examines the high price that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were willing to pay in order to achieve total victory in World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/korean-studies
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    49 mins
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