So-Rim Lee

Academy of Korean Studies Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Lecturer at the Center for Korean Research

Office: 909A IAB
Office Hours: R 2:30-4:00
Email: sl2179@columbia.edu

Educational Background

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3217 Korean Popular Cinema
EAAS UN 3207 Lights, Camera, Action: The Visual Culture of K-pop

Research Interests

Contemporary performance and popular culture in Korea, critical race and gender theories, performance studies and visual culture, film and global media studies, transnational East Asia

So-Rim Lee is the 2018-19 Center for Korean Research-Academy of Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. Lee researches on contemporary popular culture’s complex embodiments of neoliberalism through performance studies and visual culture, with a focus on South Korea. Lee’s doctoral dissertation, “Performing the Self: Cosmetic Surgery and the Political Economy of Beauty in Korea,” weds historiography, cultural studies, media studies, and performance analysis to construe cosmetic surgery as a mode of performing one’s subjectivity in contemporary Korea. Lee has previously written for New Theatre Quarterly, Performance Research, and Theatre Survey, and is a recipient of the Ric Weiland Humanities and Sciences Fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and the Charlene Porras Graduate Scholar Award from the El Centro Chicano y Latino at Stanford University.

Laurel Kendall

Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History

Email: lk7@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University (’79)
MA: Columbia University (’76)
AB: University of California, Berkeley (’69)

Research Interests

Popular Religions in East Asia, Shamans, Sacred Objects, Contemporary Korea

As an anthropologist of Korea, Dr. Kendall has been working with and writing about Korean shamans for nearly thirty years. Having attended their performances in the early 1970s as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea, she became interested in the relationship between this largely female tradition and the operation of gender in Korean popular religion. In 1989, Dr. Kendall collaborated with documentary filmmaker Diana Lee in filming the story of a shaman’s initiation, a visual complement to her books.

More recently, Prof Kendall has been examining how changes in the shamans’ world keep pace with the social and economic transformation of South Korean society. This project includes questions of space and landscape, performance, ritual consumption, national identity, and market anxieties. She is also working with colleagues in Hanoi, Vietnam, studyingl “the sacred life of material goods.” Following the work of Alfred Gell, they are exploring the relationship between people and objects, relationships that have rules, obligations, potential benefits, and dangers.

Working between Korea and Vietnam, Dr. Kendall is cautiously interested in regional comparisons. Vietnamese folklorist Dr. Nguyen Thi Hien and her are exploring points of similarity and contrast between Korean shamans and spirit mediums of Vietnam’s Mother Goddess Religion.

Selected Publications

The Museum at the End of the World: Travels in the Post-Soviet Russian Far East (University of Pennsylvania, 2005).

Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (University of California, 1996)

The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales (University of Hawaii, 1988)

Lauran Hartley

ADJUNCT LECTURER IN TIBETAN LITERATURE

Office:  300 Kent Hall
Office Hours: By appointment
Phone: (212)854-9875
Email: lh2112@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Northwestern University (’85)
MA: Indiana University (’98)
PhD: Indiana University (’03)

Classes Taught

EAAS GU4553 Survey of Tibetan Literature

Research Interests

Tibetan Literature and Cultural Production, Translation Studies

Lauran Hartley is Tibetan Studies Librarian for the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University and occasionally serves as Adjunct Lecturer in Tibetan Literature for the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She has also taught courses on Tibetan literature and religion at Indiana and Rutgers universities. In addition to co-editing the book Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2008) and serving as Inner Asian Book Review Editor for the Journal of Asian Studies, she has also published several literary translations and articles on Tibetan intellectual history. Her current research focuses on literary production and discourse from the eighteenth century to present.

Selected Publications

Co-editor, Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2008)

“The Advent of Modern Tibetan Free-Verse Poetry in the Tibetan Language” in A New Literary History of Modern China (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017)

“Self as a faithful public servant: The autobiography of Mdo mkhar ba Tshe ring dbang rgyal (1697–1763)” in Mapping the Modern in Tibet. Proceedings of the 11th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, 2006 (Andiast, Switzerland: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 2011)

“Ascendancy of the Term rtsom-rig [literature] in Tibetan Literary Discourse” in Contemporary Tibetan Literary Studies. Proceedings of the 10th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, 2003 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007)

“Tibetan Publishing in the Early Post-Mao Period.” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 15 (2005)