The 2025 Dungsil Dungsil AsIA Cultural Festival is a special preview event for Books that Illuminated Asia, an online public lecture series organized by the AsIA Center for Regional Humanities, presented in collaboration with the Korean Publishers Association and Seoul Art Book Bogo.

Books that Illuminated Asia explores the histories and cultures of various regions through the great works of Asian literature, sharing the wisdom contained within them. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected and opportunities for communication among people of diverse cultures and histories expand, this series seeks to discover ways of understanding Asia anew—through classic texts introduced by leading experts from each region.
This edition of the Dungsil Dungsil AsIA Cultural Festival offers a preview of selected lectures on the masterpieces of West Asia.

Jeong-ah Kim: Currently teaching in the Department of Arabic and the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Her main research fields are medieval Arabic prose and diaspora literature. She has consistently introduced the world of Arabic literature to Korean readers through her Korean translations of works such as The Miser, Maps of the Night, and The Muqaddimah.

Saera Gwak: Author of Persian Grammar, Standard Textbook of Persian, and A Dictionary of Persian Idioms for Translation and Interpretation, she has established a systematic foundation for Persian language education. Her research on topics such as “Polysemy in Persian” and “A Cognitive-Linguistic Analysis of Cultural Vocabulary” explores the intricate relationship between language and culture.

Nan-A Lee: Author of Understanding Turkish Literature, Orhan Pamuk: From the Margins to the Center, and Orhan Pamuk and His Literary World. She has translated more than sixty Turkish literary works into Korean, including My Name Is Red, and has also translated Korean works such as Kim Young-ha’s I Have the Right to Destroy Myself into Turkish, contributing to the globalization of Korean literature.

Neung-woo Kim : Has taught Arabic language and culture at various universities, including Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Chung-Ang University, and Hansung University, nurturing the next generation of scholars. As a member of the Ministry of Education’s Arabic Curriculum Committee, he helped establish the foundation for Arabic education in Korea and co-authored Arabic textbooks for both foreign language and general high schools. He is an active member of major academic societies such as the Korean Association of Middle Eastern Studies, the Korean Association of Islamic Studies, and the Korean Association of Arabic Language and Literature. In 2020, he received the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation, hosted by the Qatari government, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Arabic-Korean literary translation.