[KS] Please Share Upcoming GWIKS Premodern Korea Lecture

Tue Apr 7 10:20:22 EDT 2026

Hello,

Please share this upcoming event on the listserv:

*The Premodern Korea Lecture Series*
*Engineers of the Confucian State:*

*The Making of Early Modern Korea*

*Friday, April 17th, 20261:00 P.M. – 21:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)*

*    Virtual Event via Zoom*
Register Here!
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1982989761758?aff=oddtdtcreator>

*Event Description*
This talk introduces the “ingeniators” of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910),
technical leaders who exercised authority over the state’s material design,
standards, and production. Drawing on newly uncovered archives, surviving
artifacts, and experimental reconstructions, I show how these figures
oversaw government workshops that produced guns, built tombs and bridge,
and even made early torpedoes and steam engines. Over five centuries,
ingeniators rose in social standing and intellectual authority, finding a
stable footing among the chungin (middle people) while exchanging knowledge
with physicians, interpreters, editors, and yangban scholars. Even more
important, their ingenuity developed into enduring systems of
knowledge—from “prototyping,” the practices of drawing, modeling, and
measuring, to “mechanics,” the application of natural philosophy to
material design. These practices, I argue, helped govern the Confucian
state by sustaining its many material enterprises. They also reveal a form
of early modern engineering fully commensurate with other traditions,
inviting us to rethink the history of engineering beyond Renaissance Italy
or the French Polytechnique.

*Speaker*
*H.H. (Hyeok Hweon) Kang*
*H.H. (Hyeok Hweon) Kang* is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages
and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a historian of
Chosŏn Korea and early modern science and technology. His research
interests include social and intellectual history, material culture
studies, and global history. He is currently completing a book manuscript
on engineering and statecraft in Chosŏn Korea, under contract with the
University of Chicago Press.

*Moderator*
* Celeste Arrington*
*Celeste Arrington *is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political
Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She
is the Director of the GW Institute for Korea Studies and Co-Director of
the East Asia National Resource Center. She is also a Visiting Research
Scholar at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. Her
comparative research examines public policy, law and social change,
lawyers, and governance, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan.
Other research interests include Northeast Asian security, North Korean
human rights, and transnational activism. Her first book was Accidental
Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and
South Korea (Cornell, 2016). She has published numerous articles and, with
Patricia Goedde, she co-edited Rights Claiming in South Korea (Cambridge,
2021). Her newest book, published in 2025 in Cambridge’s Studies in Law and
Society series, is entitled From Manners to Rules: Advocating for Legalism
in South Korea and Japan. It analyzes the legalistic turn in Korean and
Japanese regulatory style through paired case studies related to tobacco
control and disability rights. She received a PhD from UC Berkeley, an
MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an AB from Princeton
University. She has been a fellow at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. GW’s
Office of the Vice President for Research awarded her the 2021 Early Career
Research Scholar Award. Her article with Claudia Kim won the 2023 Asian Law
and Society Association’s distinguished article award.
Program Agenda
<https://emma-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/0oueb/3778505401aa4d15513b5e9478b9f1be/Hyeok_Hweon_Kang_Program_Flyer.pdf>

Past Lectures
*Jungwon Kim*(Columbia University)
*Governing Justice: Legal Interpretation and Judicial Practice in Chosŏn
Korea*

March 20, 2026
[image: https://youtu.be/SPRi7UsOMs0?si=fvrZrINgciTloNGu]
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TFGSl5QmdA>
*Isabelle Sancho *(School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences
(EHESS))
* “Confucianisme, la voie coréenne” (Confucianism, The Korean Way)*

January 23, 2026
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TFGSl5QmdA>
*Sixiang Wang *(University of California, Los Angeles)
*The Grand Strategy of a Middling Power: A New Diplomatic History Approach
to Early Modern Korean Relations with China*

November 7, 2025
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leu7S96_a0w>
*Dennis Wuerthner *(Boston University)
*Kǔmo sinhwa as anti-yiduan propaganda-fiction*

April 7, 2025
*Hyun Suk Park*(University of California, Los Angeles)
*Courtesans in Military Garrisons in Choson Korea*

March 28, 2025
*Ksenia Chizhova*(Princeton University)
*From King's Body to Queen's Hand: Royal Vernacular Calligraphy in Korea*

November 8, 2024
*Barbara Wall*(University of Copenhagen)
*The Dynamic Essence of Transmedia Storytelling: A Graphical Approach to
The Journey to the West in Korea*

October 1, 2024
*Wenjiao Cai*
(DePauw University)
*The Commodification of Chosŏn Ginseng and the Scale of Environmental
Change in Early Modern East Asia*

March 27, 2024
*Sujung Kim*
(DePauw University)
*Warding Off Woes: Epidemic Talismans*
*in Chosŏn Buddhism*

February 22, 2024
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