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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

Hyungji Park is 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 visual culture in nineteenth-century British-Korean relations.