Column

1. Factors in the growth and consolidation of KS in Europe

Korean Studies in Europe have seen an unprecedented development in the past ten years. Our field was slow in coming into its own. Although the roots of Korean Studies in Europe reach deep into the 19th century, if not further back, KS have grown into visibility only late in the 20th century. I cannot trace the history of Korean Studies in Europe here, but would like to illustrate this development by just one pair of numbers: The inaugural AKSE conference, held in 1977, featured around six papers , while for the last AKSE conference in April this year, there were around 500 submissions from which 160 were selected.

This leap in numbers is of course not due to the growth of KS in Europe alone, but had its reasons in the global significance that AKSE has gained in the decades after its founding as a mainstay of the humanities within the Korea Studies field in general, so that overseas and Korean scholars in the humanities, and especially those with a more philological leaning, see good reasons to attend AKSE conferences.

We may therefore view the growth and consolidation of KS in Europe as going hand in hand with internal and external networking and scholarly exchange, but also with its developing (or maintaining) a recognizable profile. Having its roots in religious studies and folklore studies on the one hand and in philology, especially in linguistics and literature, on the other, KS in Europe have of course greatly diversified and have now specialists in all subfields, and yet curricula as well as research outputs still carry the mark of the academic traditions that helped to build the field in Europe. As far as I can judge, this profile has been of help for European KS in maintaining a certain position within the global field, in spite of a number of parameters that compound its competitiveness (e.g., the always precarious funding and staffing in a predominantly public education system). Of course, as AKSE conferences also demonstrate, the maturing of KS in Europe could never have been achieved without the support of dedicated Korean colleagues, some of whom have been friends of and regular attendants of AKSE for decades, and the financial support of Korean funding agencies.

We can also be content with KS having achieved the status of conversation partner, rather than an off-shoot, with neighbouring fields such as Chinese and Japanese studies (a merit of global Korean Studies, not especially that of scholars based in Europe, who however consciously and conscientiously took part in this development).

Another big step in consolidating the position of KS within academia at large was made through our contributions to larger collaboration projects within and beyond the humanities, and by successes in securing prestigious research grants. As examples, I may mention the contributions of Bochum KS to a large collaborative project funded by the German Ministry of Education (2008-2020), the taking part of KS at Berlin in a Special Research Area funded by the German Research Foundation, (since 2012), the collaboration between Paris, Leiden and other Europeans under the auspices of the French National Research Agency (ANR), and a prestigious ERC project in Leiden (2014-2019). There are certainly many more such achievements elsewhere in Europe that have escaped my attention. Research successes such as these go a long way in raising awareness of the global and historical importance of Korea in an academic environment that sorely needs such input in order to overcome its parochiality, and over time it leads to scholars from “disciplinary” fields (such as literature, history, religious studies and the like) to think not only of the Islamic world, India, China and Japan when devising comparative research, but to actively search for colleagues in Korean Studies who might contribute. I am deeply satisfied to report from my own experience that this stage has been reached in Germany.

So far, I have only talked of inner-academic factors and achievements. It goes without saying that funding by Korean agencies has been fundamental to the institutional consolidation of KS in Europe. But of course, KS in Europe could not have grown institutionally to the degree they did without the enormous growth in student numbers. Again a few numbers for illustration: In Germany in 1999, when I took over the Bochum position, I was one of three professors in all of Germany; between 2003 and 2008, there were only two of us in two cities. Today, we have six functioning KS institutes throughout Germany, and six tenured professorial positions with a KS denomination (plus a couple more positions/people that do not fulfil these two criteria but may be counted as KS professors nevertheless). Further growth is to be expected, since this number is still low in relation to the rise of student numbers, which has increased tenfold in Bochum alone and maybe – a rough guess – thirtyfold (i.e., by 3000 percent) throughout Germany during the same period. And all this pales, I believe, in comparison to the growth of KS in France about which we will hear more later today, and in many other places in Europe.

All in all, then, we have reason to be satisfied with what has been achieved and look optimistically towards the future. And yet, I see much reason to be self-reflexive and even wary rather than self-congratulatory. The growth we have experienced is in itself a challenge rather than just an achievement. But there are challenges beyond this simple fact which we had better not ignore.

2. Challenges

KS in Europe have to deal with challenges that are specific to Europe, such as the better integration of Eastern and Western European networks. Rather than these, I today wish to highlight issues that may be of more relevance to the colleagues from other continents. The challenges I have in mind fall into two categories: those of an institutional kind or connected to institutional issues, and those connected to deeper issues of our self-understanding and our self-positioning within our societies.

1) Institutional challenges
The main institutional challenge I see concerns continuity and stability of KS positions. Of course, my view on these issues is mainly informed by the situation in Germany, and my examples will be from this country. Academic systems in Europe are too diverse to provide an integrated overview here. I assume, however, that at least some of my observations on Germany are of larger relevance.

In general, KS have established themselves to some degree in the curricula of some of the major universities in most European countries. However, in spite of this fact and in spite of the ever-growing importance of Korea on the world stage and of the attention South Korea garners through its cultural exports, particular KS professorships are often less secure than we would wish. This is true, e.g., for places in the U.K. which do not have an undergraduate program in KS, such as Cambridge where teaching on Korea seems to have largely disappeared with the single professor who had been entrusted with it. In Germany, we have in the past seen vanish even full KS programs that had been active for decades – in the 1990s in Berlin, in the 2000s in Tübingen. Both of these programs have been revived directly or indirectly; yet, we have had to learn from these experiences to never take the sheer existence of our programs for granted, even though a repetition of this unfortunate history appears extremely unlikely at the time being. Let us assume that in a decade from now, hallyu loses its grip on the young generation and student numbers fall rapidly. In that case, a strong network with other disciplines at the same university would be the main guarantee for the maintenance of status quo for KS: Only colleagues who feel they profit from the existence of KS at their institution, be it due to collaboration in research or to joint teaching, will lend their support. It is therefore important not to lose sight of interdisciplinary collaboration because of the ever rising demands of diversifying KS itself.

A currently more relevant threat than the loss of KS positions is the hijacking of such positions through colleagues from other fields. This may be a uniquely German problem – where “area studies” such as, say, Chinese Studies, are usually organised as independent units, rather than distributed among disciplinary departments – but it may contain lessons for other situations as well. The German way of structuring the humanities has the advantage that even a single KS scholar at a given university is sufficient to build a KS curriculum, as long as the denomination of the professorship is “Korean Studies”. It has the disadvantage that universities wishing to establish a KS curriculum need no more than a single professorship (plus some dependent teaching staff such as language lecturers) to do so. This is in fact the situation in almost all of the six presently functioning KS institutes. This means, however, that when a professorial position needs to be filled, no local KS professor will have a say in the process – a situation that has repeatedly resulted in positions being filled by scholars from other than KS background, even at the time when a generation of younger scholars thoroughly educated in KS had already been reared. The choices that have thus been made by “outsiders” must not necessarily be detrimental; the infusion of the field with new perspectives may well be conducive to creative developments. However, these occurrences are clear witness to a relative weakness of KS that could be remedied only by the regular establishment of at least two tenured professorships at each university with a full KS curriculum.

2) Academic Challenges
The following observations are not meant to be comprehensive. Any attempt to identify larger challenges that concern the field as a whole will remain severely circumscribed by one’s personal perspective and the selective nature of the discourses one joins. This is certainly true of the following comments.

As mentioned above, the growth in student numbers was and is instrumental in the institutional strengthening of KS in Europe. However, in terms of our academic endeavours and the education we are able to offer, it is also a major challenge – not only because of the difficulties of adapting the number of faculty to the volatile rise and fall of student numbers, but because of the nature of the student body. As is well known, the main attractor for undergraduates to KS is Korean popular culture, mainly pop music and TV drama. Insofar as “nation branding” has been the major motive behind the South Korean government’s push of the cultural industry into global markets, this move has indeed been successful; a positive image of South Korea prevails among the young generation. However, it is not clear into what kinds of interest in Korea this image translates, even among those whom it draws into Korean Studies as undergraduates. Acquiring Korean language skills, especially in oral Korean, seems to be the main motive of the overwhelming majority of undergraduates. It has become more and more difficult to teach academic written language and the traditional standard subjects such as history, literature and intellectual history. A huge gap has arisen between the intellectual interests and horizon of KS faculty and those of our student body – a gap that partly relates to the ever widening generation gap in a world that is spinning faster than ever, and partly is the effect of Korea’s own enormously fast development and continuing change (for someone in my generation, the Korea we are asked to teach on now has little resemblance to the Korea that ignited our own curiosity), but partly also stems from the reductionist image of South Korea as the land of Samsung and BTS that circulates in Western media (the existence and the image of North Korea seem to play little role in student interest).

While it is our duty as teachers to try to reach our students as best as we can, this situation confronts us with a dilemma. We may choose to redefine our curricula so as to better captivate students’ attention. However, there are limits to such adaptations if the character of serious academic study is to be maintained, especially in the light of the ideal of research-oriented teaching. And if, as I stated above, the strength of the philological tradition is one of the “selling points” of KS in Europe within global KS, we would actually do a disservice to those among our students who might pursue an academic career later on if we dissociate our curricular contents from this tradition. It is therefore not possible to avoid that our scholarly pursuits are losing at least part of their grounding in the student audience.

This is not to say that we suffer from a lack of talented junior scholars. To the contrary, there is a considerable imbalance between the number of young graduates ready to enter the job market and the number of positions the latter provides. Competition is harsh among a generation of young scholars who are cosmopolitan in education and outlook and are often willing to go almost anywhere on the globe where they are offered a position. They are able to do that since language requirements typically (though of course not everywhere) consist of nothing but Korean and English, the two languages that dominate KS discourse.

This situation, although often difficult in terms of life management for the young scholars involved, is far from deplorable academically. Rather, we may state that the global confluence of Korean Studies in these two languages and the ease of scholarly discussion now being conducted in a continuous code-switching between the two languages (and between the academic cultures that are to some extent connected to these language) is conducive to a high level of scholarly creativity and acumen. And yet, I do see a necessity to reflect on this rise of a globally mobile KS community which can so beautifully converse among themselves. For the price of this smooth global conversation is, to some extent, the lack of a commitment to local communication on Korea, as teaching and publishing in the local languages are more and more becoming secondary pursuits. (Of course, the situation is different in each European country; some languages, such as French and even Czech, seem to give in far less to English as main academic language than German is doing. However, the overall trend is noticeable even there.) We need to see the necessity for KS to be grounded in local academic and public discourse in order to make sense; which means that some of our energies have to go into publications for a broader, non-specialist audience, media presence, public lectures, and translation work. Otherwise, KS may end up as a self-referential cloud completely detached from the ground below.

The image of the cloud is an illustrative one. In the hanmun tradition, clouds have been largely synonymous with dreams, both clouds and dreams being metaphors for the transient, but also for longing, expectation and imagination. Their aloofness is a precondition for the clouds to be able to lend form and presence to our more high-flying visions. The uprooted-ness of globalized anglophone KS may likewise be a precondition of its ability to absorb and reflect the most abstract and sophisticated academic discourse of which we are capable, enabling the highest degree of flexibility of thought. At the same time, the most cherished quality of the cloud is its being a harbinger of rain that fertilizes the ground. What I am asking for is not to do away with the cloud, but that we may consider more thoroughly what it takes for the cloud to give rain.

Ultimately, this means not only paying heed to the fact that some of our obligations relate to local societies, but also contemplating what Korean Studies might be able to contribute to dealing with the challenges lying ahead for humanity at large, be it climate change and environmental degradation, the digitization of all spheres of life, or the prevention of war. As naïve and unacademic as this question may appear, I am convinced that we are no longer in a position to put it on hold. Finding answers to this question, albeit tenuous ones, will be of utmost importance for keeping Korean Studies relevant, both locally and globally.