Interrogating 'K-Culture': Religion, culture and philosophy through multicultural perspectives

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Park, So-Jeong: PARK, So-Jeong is a Professor of Korean Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University and serves as the director of the Institute of Korean Philosophy and Culture (IKPC), where she leads the K-Academic Expansion Project (KAEP). She taught in Nangyang Technological University in Singapore 2010 to 2017 and is currently Visiting Professor in Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024 to 2025. Her research interests encompass Korean Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Music. 

She has published widely including in Korean, English, and Chinese, including A Study on Seongho Yi Ik’s Emotional Spectrum ― Focusing on the Analysis of Emotional Vocabulary through Word2Vec (Korean, 2024, collab.); The Dynamic Characteristics of “Jeong 情: A New Perspective on the Korean Neo-Confucian Four–Seven Debate (2023)”; On Sound: Reconstructing a Zhuangzian Perspective of Music (English, 2015); 《流动的音乐思维——先秦诸子音乐论新探》(Chinese, 2016).

Professor Park has developed online courses available on Coursera, covering topics such as "Introduction to Korean Philosophy and Culture", "In Search for the Origins of Korean Philosophy", which has drawn over 17K learners, and "Korean Music, A Philosophical Exploration" (collab.).

Farrah Sheikh: Dr Farrah Sheikh is a Senior Researcher at the Academy of Korea Studies-funded K-Academic Expansion Project at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea. She completed her PhD at SOAS University of London in 2018, where she remains a Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies. 

Her research interests include the study of Muslim minority communities in multicultural contexts focusing on conversion to Islam, Muslim youth identities, refugee issues and Islamophobia with fieldwork sites in Britain and South Korea. 

Barbara Wall: Professor Barbara Wall is an associate professor in Korean Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She has a BA in Japanese Studies and Classical Chinese from Heidelberg University, an MA in Confucian Studies from Sungkyunkwan University, and a PhD in Korean Literature from Ruhr-University Bochum. She is interested in the circulation, translation, and adaptation of literary narratives in Korea, Japan and China. 

Her first book The Dynamic Essence of Transmedia Storytelling: A Graphical Approach to The Journey to the West in Korea has appeared in Brill’s East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture series in 2024.

Robert Winstanley-Chesters: Dr Robert Winstanley-Chesters is an AKS Teaching and Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to this Robert worked as a Lecturer at York St John University, Bath Spa University, University of Leeds, Birkbeck, University of London, as a Research Fellow at Australian National University (under Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki's ARC Laureate Fellowship project 'Informal Life Politics in the Remaking of Northeast Asia') and as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge (under Professor Heonik Kwon's AKS Lab project 'Beyond the Korean War'). 

Robert obtained a BD in Divinity from Edinburgh in 1998, and an MA and PhD in Human Geography from the University of Leeds in 2008/2013. Robert’s PhD thesis is titled Ideology and the Production of Landscape in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Robert is the author of the monographs Environment, Politics and Ideology in North Korea (Lexington, 2014), Vibrant Matter(s): Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Her Neighbours (Springer, 2020) and New Goddess on Mt Paektu:  Myth and Transformation in North Korean Landscape (Black Halo/Amazon KDP, 2020). Robert was also co-editor of Change and Continuity in North Korean Politics (Routledge, 2016).

Robert is currently researching North Korea necro-mobilities and other difficult or unwelcome bodies and materials in Korea/East Asian historical geography, work which has published in a variety of academic journals and his monograph Vibrant Matter(s): Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Her Neighbours. Robert is also researching the processes and landscapes of geographic knowledge production, fieldwork and theory during the Japanese Imperial and Korean colonial era. 

This work is the subject of a forthcoming paper in The Journal of Historical Geography, and in a forthcoming monograph project, co-authored with Dr Adam Cathcart of the University of Leeds. 

Owen Miller: Dr Owen Miller initially studied East Asian history at SOAS as an undergraduate and subsequently lived in South Korea, where he studied Korean language at Yonsei University. 

He returned to SOAS in 2001 to study for an MA and then a PhD in Korean history, focusing on merchant guilds in late nineteenth century Seoul. Prior to coming to SOAS as a lecturer in Korean Studies, Owen worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge.

Current research interests include: the social and economic history of 19th and 20th century Korea; urban history; Korean nationalist and Marxist historiographies; the economic history of North Korea; and state formation in Northeast Asia.

Yoon Hwa Walker: Yoon Hwa Walker is a research student at SOAS University of London, studying 'Institutionalized Human Rights Violation during the 1960s and 1970s in South Korea'. Current research interests include: the social and economic history of South Korea under military regime; human rights violation, post-colonial/postwar South Korean society. 

ORGANISERS

• Farrah Sheikh (K-Academic Expansion Project under Institute of Korean Philosophy and Culture (IKPC), Sungkyunkwan University)
• Owen Miller (CKS, SOAS)
• Niʿma Burney (CIS, SOAS) 

For further information please contact cis@soas.ac.uk with the subject header ‘Interrogating K-Culture’.