My research centres on four areas, with the cultural history of Korea in Europe at its centre. Much of it pursues one question in different periods and directions: what happens to knowledge when it crosses a boundary — what is selected, what is transformed, what is refused. The circulation of knowledge is the frame within which I have studied European images of East Asia, the reception of Western learning in Chosŏn Korea, and the transfer of German unification experience to Korea alike.
Korea in Europe — how Europeans have made and remade images of Korea across four centuries, and how such images are now made everywhere at once
Germany and Korea — how unification experience becomes transferable knowledge, and what happens to it on arrival
The Two Korean States — politics, society, and political culture in South and North Korea
Knowledge in Korea — Confucian institutions of learning, and what happens to a tradition when it encounters knowledge from outside
Korea in Europe: Images of East Asia over Four Hundred Years
My work in this area belongs to the intercultural history of political ideas and culture. “Anti-Europa” pursued it through European readings of Confucian society from the early Enlightenment onward, asking why the same society could be described as a Platonic ideal state, as oriental despotism, as the cause of stagnation, and finally as the engine of capitalist success. There the object European observers chiefly had in view was China. My current research pursues the same field with Korea as its object.
Europeans have been writing about Korea for some four hundred years. The project traces that record as a cultural history: how knowledge and images of Korea have been produced, circulated, and transformed in different European contexts, and how Koreans themselves have shaped those processes. It draws on travel accounts, newspapers and illustrated magazines, scholarship, exhibitions, political discourse, and the presence and activity of Koreans in Europe. I am particularly interested in the actors, institutions, and media through which Korea became visible and intelligible here, and in which images proved durable enough to outlive the conditions that produced them.
Korea entered the European field of vision later and less often than China or Japan, and largely through frames already built for them. What happens to an image assembled in good part out of borrowed parts is one of the questions this project pursues. As with the Confucianism debate, these representations record European preoccupations at least as reliably as Korean realities: they tell us how Korea was seen, and also what Europeans at a given moment needed a distant society to be.
The last chapter of this history is being written now, and it is no longer only European. For four centuries the making of Korea’s image belonged to Europe; today audiences across the world meet Korea first through its popular culture, and in consuming it they construct images of the country for themselves — images shaped less by Korea than by what each society brings to the encounter. Hallyu is the third wave of East Asian popular culture to reach Europe, and the European case remains my own vantage point. But it is now one case among many, and what these cases let me compare is the process itself: who assembles an image of Korea, out of what materials, and against which local preoccupations.
Moving Knowledge between Germany and Korea: Unification, Division, Migration
This field examines the movement of political and policy knowledge between Germany and Korea, particularly knowledge derived from German unification and post-socialist transformation. German experience is not a model available for adoption. It becomes usable only once it has been selected, transmitted through particular institutions, and adapted or resisted in the Korean context — which makes the question of who does the selecting as consequential as the content selected.
I have worked on that selection from inside it. I directed the compilation of the thirty-volume documentary series on German unification published by the Ministry of Unification in Seoul, covering military integration, public administration, infrastructure, policing, women’s policy, and coming to terms with the past, each volume edited and annotated for Korean readers. Deciding what a Korean policymaker needed to see, and how a German document had to be framed to be intelligible in Seoul, is the practical form of the question this research asks.
Knowledge of this kind also travels through people. Koreans who have lived in Germany across the decades of division experienced two national partitions at once, and many became mediators between the two countries. Their experience is part of this research rather than a separate subject.
Division is where these questions lead. The Korean Peninsula belongs to a wider East Asian political and security order, and I remain interested in the conditions under which conflict there might be reduced rather than merely managed, and in what more durable forms of regional peace and cooperation would require.
Two Korean States: Democracy, Society, and Political Culture
My work on contemporary Korea began with a normative question — whether a state can be strong and democratic at once — and has stayed close to the societies rather than the theory ever since. It encompasses both Korean states: democratization, political institutions, civil society, and political culture in the South; political leadership, ideology, economic transformation, and state–society relations in the North.
Political culture has been a constant concern. Since 2002 I have followed how Koreans act politically outside institutions, from the netizen mobilization of that year’s election through the candlelight demonstrations to the martial law crisis of December 2024, when citizens defended the constitutional order carrying the light sticks of concert audiences — evidence that democratic commitment rests on attachments which institutional accounts of democracy do not capture. Alongside this I write on questions of identity, gender, and everyday culture in a society that has transformed itself faster than almost any other.
Knowledge in Korea: Confucian Institutions and the Encounter with the West
My research on Korean Confucianism approaches it as a matter of knowledge in motion. The sŏwŏn, the Confucian academies of the Chosŏn dynasty, offer a site for examining how scholarship, education, ritual, local society, political authority, and cultural memory held together — and how such knowledge changed, often precisely where it claimed to be immutable.
The eighteenth century tested that body of knowledge against an outside. When Chŏng Yag-yong read Matteo Ricci, and when Chosŏn scholars decided what in Western learning could be admitted and what could not, the question was not what Korea imported but what a Confucian order could absorb without ceasing to be itself. Selection under pressure of this kind is where a tradition’s working assumptions become visible.
The reforming intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced a different situation, and I study them within the circulation of knowledge. Yu Kil-chun translating German political science, and his contemporaries who had to think with two traditions at once, were moving knowledge between institutions and languages under political duress. Their work is the counterpart to the first area above: there, Europe assembled its images of Korea; here, Koreans read Europe and decided what to carry home.