International Workshop: “Gender(ed) Histories of Korea and Japan”

22-24 September 2017, Tuebingen, Germany

Established in March 2012, the European Forum on Korean-Japanese History aims to promote dialogue between historians of Korea and Japan in Europe. The Forum is an independent body supported by the National Institute for Korean History. Its initial objective is to organize biennial workshops bringing together historians of Japan and Korea to exchange views on subjects of mutual relevance and interest.

The Forum functions as a platform where the tangled histories of Korea and Japan are critically debated, common framing concepts are questioned, source materials are reread and untapped archival materials mobilized. As the professional field is still largely defined by national labels, the Forum probes these labels as ordering principles that reproduce contemporary antagonisms in both research and teaching. For too long, a historiography based on the nation-state has often made it difficult to engage in relevant dialogues. Now, theoretical and methodological developments in historiography allow the writing of history beyond the nation-state and open up new fields of research.

In this workshop, we want to look at the cultural, political, social, religious or economic history of Korea and Japan through the ‘lenses of gender’. We invite papers addressing the ways in which gender ideologies are interwoven into the histories of Korea and Japan from premodern to contemporary times. How did encounters or exchanges between the two countries affect gender roles and shaped women’s and men’s everyday lives? Which role did gender conceptions play in shaping Korean and Japanese histories? We want to bring together not only research about issues of women, but about gender conceptions in their mutual interrelation, as well as about images of masculinity and their historical significance. With its focus on the shared history of Korea and Japan, this workshop wants to contribute to a rewriting of historical developments between these countries by including the perspective of gender. At the same time we hope to widen the horizon of gender history approaches beyond national confines.

Abstracts (max. 600 words and a short bio) can be sent to the workshop

organizers You Jae Lee (lee@aoi.uni-tuebingen.de) and Monika Schrimpf (monika.schrimpf@uni-tuebingen.de) before 30 September 2016.

Presenters will be notified of acceptance by October 31^st, 2016. Pending funding, all costs will be covered.

The European Forum on Korean-Japanese History:

Koen De Ceuster (Leiden University)
Christopher Gerteis (SOAS, University of London)
Kwang Jae Kim (NIKH), ex officio.
Barak Kushner (Cambridge University)
You Jae Lee (Tuebingen University)
James Lewis (University of Oxford)
Kiri Paramore (Leiden University)
Monika Schrimpf (Tuebingen University)
Michael Shin (Cambridge University)