2007 – Year in Review

On my way back to Seoul after two weeks or so in the United States I looked through the past year’s worth of pictures, calendar events, diary entries, blog postings, audio recordings, and emails—the historical archive of my life in the year 2007. What kind of narrative can be constructed from the mountain of fragments of so recent a past? What failures and tragedies omitted? What triumphs will be glorified? What distortions will my own reflections produce?

The first five months of the year find me in Cambridge, MA for the Spring semester of the third year of my PhD program in history. I lived in an apartment some fifteen minutes walk from the university campus together with one of my best friends and fellow historians Fabian who, in addition to filling my dinners and evenings with the joys of wonderful and highly educational conversations, introduced me to the wonders that are balsamic vinegar and hummus. Not to be laughed at, these two new additions to my heavily bread-based diet provide me with two possible replacements for cheese when the environment (e.g. the USA and Korea) has little worthy of the name to offer.

The year opens with a bang as my fellow third year PhD students and I desperately assemble that prophetic document: the Dissertation Prospectus. The process of making third year students assemble a dissertation prospectus, as I came to understand it at the time, is designed to measure three important skills of the Academicus Novitius in the three following tasks.

• The first is the bread and butter of the institution: to demonstrate a mastery of the literature and expansive knowledge about a field which one has yet to master and has, as yet, little knowledge about. For this, the process of preparing for one’s oral examinations in the second year has provided ample training.
• Second, to ask an interesting and broad question related to one’s topic and explain in some detail what fascinating answers and claims such a question might lead to. The trick with this second task, apparently, is not to seem to know the answer already – since one has yet to begin one’s research into the question such a presumption would be deeply problematic – but also one must not seem like one has no answer to the question because this leaves open the terrifying dual possibility that either a) the answer is unattainable or at least beyond the reach of a humble graduate student or b) the answer is completely uninteresting.
• Finally, the prospectus is designed to measure the basic oracular proficiency of the graduate student. This is closely linked with the second task. The prospectus is essentially a prophetic document, wherein one predicts which books and archives will be found useful, what methodology will be found effective, and what structure and argument the as yet unwritten and un-researched dissertation will ultimately take. Unfortunately, one is not permitted to present the prospectus in Delphic riddles, which is a shame, since the preparation would probably be much more fun. I believe the entire ritual ought best be concluded with a ceremonial burying of the prospectus in a time capsule, perhaps under the floor of the history department’s lower library, where the prospectus conference is held. This might be combined with the digging up of the prospectuses of PhD candidates who have just submitted their dissertation. Those who wrote a dissertation remotely resembling their prospectus could get an award, perhaps the “Order of Delphi,” and the third year students could all look on in admiration.

The process is actually very helpful. It provides an opportunity for students to attempt to convince their advisor and other professors that it wasn’t such a bad idea to let you into the program to begin with, that you have given serious thought to your proposed project of study before trudging out to the libraries and archives, and that you stand some remote hope of completing the project within the next half decade or so. After a somewhat modified version of the prospectus is presented at a conference attended by fellow students and professors in the department, supporters among the students and professors can deploy the “critique-by-friendly-question” technique or offer more direct advise and criticism. The above skills are also immediately useful and have already been put into practice while applying for research grants in the third year, since all the deadlines for grants fall in the three months or so surrounding the prospectus conference in January.

I think my prospectus presentation, “Treason and the Reconstruction of Nation in East Asia, 1937-1951″ went over well enough, though there were many looks of concern about the breadth of my topic and the nature of some of my comparisons. I got excellent questions and advice from the professors and students present, with more detailed critiques in discussions that followed. Soon after, I put together my dissertation committee consisting of my advisor A. Gordon (a Japan historian), C. Eckert (modern Korea), H. Harrison (modern China), and C. Maier, a historian of 20th century Europe who is well-acquainted with the literature on political retribution and the aftermath of war in Europe. They have all been really wonderful in providing support for my project so far.

As a third year student I didn’t take any classes, but continued my role, begun in the Fall semester, 2006, as a Teaching Assistant. This work provided me with the stipend upon which I lived, as well as a great opportunity to develop the teaching skills I will need as a professor of history in the future. My teaching evaluations in the fall were not bad and I won a teaching award given automatically to TAs who get a certain minimum result. The students left helpful comments and together with a fellow history graduate student working for the Bok center for teaching, I watched an embarrassing but helpful video of me in one of my discussion sections to get feedback on my techniques. Watching the video, I wonder if my students thought I was on speed or some other stimulant, as I tend to get overly excited while teaching.

In the Spring semester, instead of running discussion sections for large history lecture courses offered to undergraduate students from all departments I became a “tutor.” Students who major in history go through a tutorial program that gives them the opportunity to work very closely with graduate student tutors. I was the lone tutor for an intensive sophomore reading tutorial for students interested in “Colonialism and Postcolonialism.” Each week I stayed a mere single step ahead of my students, especially when readings covered the colonial history and theory related to Africa and South Asia. I was also a tutor for the Honors research seminar where the focus is on working on the historical research and writing skills for those history majors who want to write a historical thesis in their senior year. The experience of being a tutor was really rewarding but could also be really challenging. You get to work very closely with the students and it is hard not to become personally invested in their research outcomes. Since the tutor is with the students at every stage, I felt like any disappointment I felt reflected immediately back on me and I often regretted not pushing harder at an earlier stage, of being more detailed and critical on such and such an assignment, etc. This was definitely a learning process that differed from the experience of running discussion sections.

Early February was full of good news. Sayaka heard that she was accepted to Harvard and Columbia PhD programs (she switched from Political Science to history) and the same day I heard my roommate Fabian was offered a position to teach Japanese history at Yale. I didn’t feel left out for long because the very next day I heard that I had been nominated for a Fulbright scholarship to do a year of research in Korea, receipt of which was confirmed later in March.

ChinaJapan.org – In February and March I spent a few weeks working on a project I had been planning for a long time. The wonderful Sino-Japanese studies journal, full of useful articles on the history of interaction between Japan and China, had been discontinued for a few years and I secured the permission of its editor to digitize the entire run of issues and put them all online completely open access. I scanned all the articles, added some OCR so that their contents could be (mostly) searched via google, and put them online. The result can be found at ChinaJapan.org.

The rest of Spring semester I split my time between my teaching duties as a tutor and making trips down to Washington D.C. to visit the National Archives. I wrote about my first visit to the National Archives in March here at Muninn. There I spent many wonderful days looking at State Department archival materials on early postwar Korea (RG59) and mountains of archival material from early postwar North Korea which was captured by the United States during the Korean War (RG242).

As the academic year drew to a close, I spent a lot of time on a project translating an article from Japanese (and some passages from quoted Chinese originals) on the collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei. The topic is very close to my own field and I knew the author, who is a professor at Waseda University, from my time as a research student in Japan. I continued to work on the translation in the Bartlesville, OK city library when visiting my parents and in the Birmingham city library while following my father around when he visited relatives in Alabama (I learnt some interesting phrases while I was there with him).

In mid-June I moved to Korea where I still am, as of this posting. During the summer I studied Korean at Yonsei University’s Korean Language Institute with scholarship support. To be honest, I don’t think I made enough progress. I could feel my motivation sapping as I think I’m getting tired of formal classroom language study. I still have serious defects in my Korean, including a lot of basic Korean grammar that I never mastered well enough before moving on to a more advanced level. As a result, I actually attended the same level of Korean (4 out of 6 possible levels) at Yonsei that I did at Seoul National University the summer before, though that is partly explained by the fact that the two programs don’t overlap very much at higher levels.

I was happy to be able to get out quite a bit in the spring and summer. I went hiking with some fellow historians before leaving the New England area, and also went hiking with Sayaka during summer, along with visiting some of the interesting areas and cities on the outskirts of Seoul. In late August, Sayaka, who decided to go to Columbia University for her history PhD, returned to the United States.

I finally moved into the Fulbright building here in Seoul and began my PhD research in earnest in the beginning of September. From September to December my life has become something of a blur. Basically my days so far have alternated between four locations: the Yonsei University library, a researcher’s room in the Yonsei Institute of Korean Studies where I am affiliated and have access to an excellent collection of old Korean newspapers, reading at home, and language exchanges in coffee shops. I have also made some visits to the Korean Film archive which has a wonderful collection of old films.

There are a lot of materials in book and newspaper form that I have been working through and I don’t expect to finish this stage of my research until late January or into February. My reading speed has gradually improved but I can’t claim to have made any huge and startling discoveries. For this my work in the National Archives last spring has so far yielded the most. When I finish going through early postwar newspapers hopefully later this month I will be branching out a bit to visit some of the other archives and libraries where I hope to find some of the less exploited historical materials for the Korean side of my dissertation on the punishment of pro-Japanese collaborators in the early postwar period.

In order to maintain contact with other human beings and hopefully improve my spoken Korean, I do a lot of language exchanges. Meeting in coffee shops and talking about mostly politics, literature, and history, my language partners (who have since all become good friends) include a German literature professor, a journalist, a graduate student studying Korean Confucian classics and a graduate student studying modern Japanese imperial history. I think I have learnt more Korean (and certainly more about Korea) from meeting these four friends every week than I did in four daily hours of language study during the summer. I hope this will continue in the spring. While reading Korean is most important for my research, I really want my spoken Korean to begin to approach my proficiency in Japanese and Chinese so that I will be able to interact effectively with Korean scholars and students in my future career. I have five months left on my Fulbright scholarship to see what progress is made towards this goal, and the more important goal of gathering materials for my dissertation. Next May I move to Taiwan for the summer and next September I move to China to continue my research on the China side of my project. I hope to complete my research tour of East Asia in Japan in the summer of 2009. I wish all my friends a very Happy New Year, and if you are on this side of the Pacific, I hope to see you in the months to come!

2006 – Year in Review
2004 – Year in Review