core faculty

Jungwon Kim

Jungwon Kim

Director of Graduate Studies, King Sejong Associate Professor of Korean Studies

Office: 402 Kent Hall
Office Hours: F 4:00-6:00 pm
Email: jk3638@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Harvard University
AM: Harvard University

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1363 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Korea
EAAS UN3412 Colloquium on Conflict & Culture in Korean History
HEAS UN3862 The History of Korea to 1900
EAAS GU4310 Narrating Premodern Korea
HSEA GU4860 Culture and Society of Chosŏn Korea, 1392-1910
EAAS GU4888 Women and Gender in Korean History
HSEA GR8861 Colloquium on Korean History to 1900
HSEA GR9860 Seminar on Korean Historical Texts

Research Interests

Premodern Korean History; Legal History; Gender and Sexuality; Women’s Writing

Jungwon Kim is a historian of premodern Korea, specializing in the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910). Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, law and justice, crime and punishment, ritual and emotion, women’s writings, and the history of knowledge.

She is the author of Virtue That Matters: Chastity Culture and Social Power in Chosŏn Korea, 1392–1910 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2025), which received an honorable mention for the 2025 Book Prize from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. Her other publications include the co-authored Wrongful Death: Selected Inquest Records from Nineteenth-Century Korea (University of Washington Press, 2014) and the co-edited Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea (University of Washington Press, 2019). She also edited the special issue “Archives, Archival Practices, and the Writing of History in Premodern Korea” (Journal of Korean Studies, 2019). Her articles have appeared in journals including Acta Koreana, Gender & History, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture, and Journal of Korean Studies.

She is currently working on a book manuscript on law, local courts, and the administration of justice in Chosŏn Korea. She earned her PhD from Harvard University, previously taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining Columbia.

Selected Publications

Virtue That Matters: Chastity Culture and Social Power in Chosŏn Korea, 1392-1910 (Harvard University Press, 2025)

“Inscribing Grievances, Litigation, and Local Community in Eighteenth-Century Korea,” Journal of Asian Studies 81.2 (2022)

Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korean History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), co-edited with Charles Kim, Hwasook Nam, and Serk-bae Suh.

“Between Morality and Crime: Filial Daughters and Vengeful Violence in Eighteenth Century Korea,” Acta Koreana (2018)

Wrongful Deaths: Selected Inquest Records from Nineteenth Century Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), co-authored with Sun Joo Kim.

“You Must Avenge on My Behalf: Widow Chastity and Honor in Nineteenth-Century Korea”, Gender and History (2014)

Robert P.W. Hymes

Robert Hymes

Carpentier Professor of Chinese History; History-East Asia Coordinator

Office: 504 Kent Hall
Phone: (212) 854-2580
Email: rph2@columbia.edu

Office hours: R 12-2:00PM, Please make an appointment in advance by email.

Educational Background

BA: Columbia College (’72)
MA: University of Pennsylvania (’75)
PhD: University of Pennsylvania (’79)

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3990 Approaches to East Asian Studies
HSEA GU4893 The Family in Chinese History
HSEA GR8883 Topics in the Middle Period of Chinese History

Research Interests

Middle-Period China, Social and Cultural History, Social Networks, Family and Kinship

Robert Hymes’ work focuses on the social and cultural history of middle period and early modern China, drawing questions and sometimes data from cultural anthropology as well as history, and using the methods of the local historian to study elite culture, family and kinship, medicine, religion, gender, and (currently) the changing role and form of Chinese social networks from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. His monographs Statesmen and Gentlemen and Way and Byway won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies for the best book on pre-1900 China in their years of publication.

Selected Publications

“Thoughts on the Problem of Historical Comparison between Europe and China,” in Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800–1600 (Oxford, forthcoming 2018)

Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China (University of California, 2002)

Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge, 1987)

Theodore Hughes

Theodore Hughes

Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities

Office: 618 Kent Hall
Office Hours: WR 3:00 pm-4:00pm
Phone: (212) 854-8545
Email: th2150@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of California, San Diego (’90)
MA: University of California, Los Angeles (’97)
PhD: University of California, Los Angeles (’02)

Classes Taught

EAAS 3215 Korean Literature and Film
EAAS 3217 Korean Popular Cinema
EAAS 4124 South Korean Film as History
EAAS 4160 Cultures in Colonial Korea

Research Interests

Theodore Hughes received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include visual culture, film, literature, and history. He works across disciplines, with a particular interest in intermediality—the relations between visual and verbal forms of cultural production. He is the author of Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War (Columbia University Press, 2026) and Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia University Press, 2012), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the James B. Palais Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies for the best book in Korean studies in the year of its publication. Co-edited works include Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Film, and Art (special issue of Journal of Korean Studies, 2015); and Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), a finalist for the Daesan Literary Translation Prize. He is the translator of Panmunjom and Other Stories by Lee Ho-Chul (EastBridge, 2004; reissued under EastBridge imprint at Camphor Press, 2017). He is currently working on a project that approaches the Korean mystery novel as a form of historiography.

Selected Publications

Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War (Columbia University Press, 2026)

Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (co-editor, Cornell, 2013)

Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia, 2012)