Thanks to the Korea Institute’s generous support, I was able to attend the summer program of the Inter-University Center for Korean Language Studies at Sungkyunkwan University (IUC). This program, which was developed with graduate-level academics and professionals in mind, allowed me to spend my summer focusing on developing my academic Korean ability in preparation for future research.
While relatively short at six weeks, IUC was no less intensive and demanding than other summer language programs. Classes included those on academic writing, advanced grammar and expressions, literature, hanja, and current events. We also went out on a short excursion to a historical site: a Buddhist temple called Kilsangsa. In addition to the aforementioned classes, students were expected to present weekly on a research topic they were pursuing for the summer, as well as meeting with an instructor for individual tutoring regarding academic articles the students were reading, culminating in a final presentation that summarized the previous weeks’ research.
Indeed, one of the great virtues of the program was its emphasis on cultivating each student’s own particular research topics. While as an incoming first year Ph.D. student I am still a long ways away from even starting a dissertation, the weekly presentations and reading sessions allowed me to explore the existing literature on potential areas for future research. As such, not only did I have the opportunity to read and present on academic papers written in Korean, I now have a much better sense of what I might pursue for my research.
Another highlight of the program were the special lectures given by Korean scholars whom IUC invited upon recommendation by the students. In the first lecture, Professor Kwon Boduerae gave a talk that proposed a different framework for interpreting the March First Movement by focusing on the concept of the immediate. In the second lecture, Professor Park Chan-Seung examined statistics relating to the colonial period and argued for the need to acknowledge the duality of colonial society in Korea, a framework that showed how the fruits of modernity were unequally shared between the colonizer and the colonized.
In sum, due to my participation in the IUC summer program, I have become much more comfortable reading about and discussing academic topics in Korean. I strongly encourage any other scholars who wish to take a summer Korean language course to apply there.