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East Asia Program

Cornell University

Korean Studies Speaker Series

Spring 2026 | Broadcasting Intimacy: Women’s Letters, Patriarchy, and Postwar Reconstruction in South Korea

Tuesday, March 3, 2026 4:45pm

Physical Sciences Building, 120

Speaker: Jina Kim, Associate Professor of Korean Literature & Culture, University of Oregon

Description: This presentation examines how a 1950s South Korean radio docudrama contributed to post-war reconstruction of national identity, shaped cultural narratives, and participated in collective healing. In South Korea, radio programs played a key role in addressing the emotional and social wounds caused by loss, displacement, and family separation in the postwar period. The docudrama media format came to capture this shared historical experience as well as everyday concerns of love, work, marriage, etc. One of the most popular radio programs during this time was Insaeng yŏngmach’a (The stagecoach of life), which was broadcasted from 1954 – 1958 on Seoul’s HLKA Station. This program was created based on listeners’ letters that were sent to the station with which professional writers then reconstructed the story into a radio drama while simultaneously providing advice to the letter writer for the dilemma that they were facing. In this presentation, I will explore how The Stagecoach of Life aestheticized real-life stories into dramatic form for the radio thereby serving as a model for the golden age of radio melodramas and docudramas in the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. By centering women’s letters and the responses crafted by elite women writers, this project traces how intimate, everyday dilemmas became mediated narratives of gendered experience. These exchanges provide insight into how modern womanhood was imagined, disciplined, and occasionally re-imagined during South Korea’s post war transition. The docudrama format exposes the push and pull between evolving notions of female agency and the persistent cultural scripts of filial duty and moral propriety.

Spring 2025 | Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War

Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War

Tuesday, April 29, 2025 

Speaker: Suzy Kim, Professor of Korean History, Rutgers University

Description: While social movements may appear to have receded in the 1950s with the rise of Cold War domesticity and McCarthyism (much like the upsurge of authoritarianisms today), the Korean War galvanized women to promote women’s rights in the context of the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Recuperating the erasure of North Korean women from this movement, this talk excavates buried histories of Cold War sutures to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternalist strategies. Socialist feminism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive understanding of “difference” toward a transversal politics of solidarity. The talk weaves together the women’s press with photographs and archival film footage to contemplate their use in transnational movements of resistance and solidarity, both then and now.

Speaker Bio: Suzy Kim is a historian and author of the prize-winning book Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick. Her latest book Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell 2023) was completed with the support of the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is senior editor of positions: asia critique, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Korean Studies and Yŏsŏng kwa yŏksa [Women and History], the journal of the Korean Association of Women’s History.

 

Spring 2024 | President by Day, President by Night: Media and Democracy in Contemporary South Korea (recording available)

President by Day, President by Night: Media and Democracy in Contemporary South Korea 

This is the inaugural lecture in the East Asia Program's Korean Studies speaker series fostered by faculty members, Ivanna Yi (Asian Studies) and Suyoung Son (Asian Studies.) Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature.

(Recording available here)

Speaker: Youngju Ryu, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan

Bio: Youngju Ryu is a specialist in modern Korean literature with research interests in politics and aesthetics of protest, cultures of authoritarianism, and mediatized publics in modern Korea. Introduced by professors Ivanna Yi (Asian Studies) and Suyoung Son (Asian Studies).

Talk Description: “President by Night” is the infamous nickname Park Chung Hee once gave to Pang Il-yŏng, the head of Chosun ilbo, South Korea’s largest daily newspaper. The nickname reveals the symbiotic nature of the relationship between the press and political regimes in authoritarian South Korea, which continued well past the transition to procedural democracy in 1987. Transforming itself from a watchdog to a lapdog to an attack dog, mainstream news media has continued to serve as a powerful stakeholder in the maintenance of conservative political regimes and agendas in twenty-first-century South Korea. Against this backdrop, the rise of new media as news media in the “post-broadcast” age, which took off with the internet, exploded with the podcast, and achieved dominance with YouTube, has been led by an irreverent and iconoclastic maverick named Kim Ou-joon. Tracing Kim's career over three decades from the founding of an internet newspaper to the launch of the wildly popular political podcast Nakkomsu, and to the recent establishment of a YouTube news channel that reached a million subscribers in the first three days of its livecast, this talk will map Kim’s sustained search for what he has termed an “alternate messaging system” onto­ the political and media terrains of his times to interrogate the relationship between media and democracy in twenty-first century South Korea.

Introduced and moderated by: Ivanna Yi

Discussant: Shiqi Lin, a current Klarman Postdoc in Asian Studies