• Date: December 3rd, Wednesday, 2025, 11:00 – 13:00
• Online via Zoom

Speaker: Eugene Y. Park (Professor,Department of History, University of Nevada, Reno)
Moderator: Ho Kim (Director, AsIA Humanities Center)

The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern Korea (2025) is an English-language edited volume that offers an interdisciplinary examination of the political, social, economic, and cultural landscape of Korea from the founding of the Joseon dynasty to the late nineteenth century. Twenty-two scholars from eleven countries contribute to this book, presenting a wide-ranging overview of major developments in late Joseon, including the consolidation of the state system, the growth of rural markets, transformations within the yangban status group, and the expansion of knowledge production. This book talk will explore the volume’s central questions, its editorial process, and the latest research perspectives on early modern Korean history together with the authors.

Professor Eugene Y. Park is a historian specializing in East Asian history, with a focus on the politics and society of early modern Korea. He studied at UCLA and Harvard, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale’s Council on East Asian Studies. He has served on the faculties of the University of California, Irvine, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Nevada, Reno. He has also taught at Harvard, Korea University, McGill, Seoul National University, and Yonsei University, and has given approximately seventy invited lectures and talks, including the 26th Stanley Spector Memorial Lecture at Washington University in St. Louis in 2019. Professor Park has advised major projects for organizations such as PBS’s Finding Your Roots (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), ICOMOS, and V-Dem. He also served as co-chair of the organizing committee for the 8th World Congress of Korean Studies in 2016.