Center for Global Studies Speaker | "From the Nile to the Han: Nineteenth-Century Korea, Egypt and the Limits of Orientalism" | Hyungji Park (Yonsei University)
- Sponsor
- Sponsored by the Center for Global Studies | Cosponsored by the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies
- Speaker
- Hyungji Park
- Contact
- Alex Chun
- park387@illinois.edu
- Views
- 13
- Originating Calendar
- CEAPS Events Calendar
Join us for a hybrid event with from Hyungji Park from Yonsei University.
About the Speaker:
Hyungji Park is a Professor of English Literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. Her research focuses on Victorian literature, postcolonial studies, and nineteenth-century contact between Britain and Korea. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is developing a project on virtual culture in nineteenth-century British-Korean relations.
About the Talk:
What happens when an American diplomat arrives in Korea expecting the "Orient" -- and doesn't find it? Charles Chaillé-Long, a veteran of the American Civil War, the Egyptian Army and explorer of the Nile, came to Seoul in the late nineteenth century with a mental map of the "Oriental" shaped by his experience in Egypt. Korea didn't fit. This talk traces how Chaillé-Long's comparisons between Egypt and Korea expose the limits of Orientalism as a framework for understanding East Asia, and what those limits mean for how we think about early Korean-American diplomatic engagements.
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