On June 24, 2024, the K-Future Team held its third Theory Atelier, centered on “Global Korean Studies: Prospects and a Practice,” a lecture by Heonik Kwon, Research Professor at the Asia Center of Seoul National University and Distinguished Professor at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Moderated by Professor Jaeho Kang (Department of Communication, SNU), the event offered an occasion to look back on the trajectory of research and thought that Professor Kwon has pursued in the field of Korean Studies.

Professor Kwon treated global Korean Studies not as a new label for Korean Studies in the twenty-first century, but as a practice of understanding the historical conditions of the Korean Peninsula within the currents of world history. Working from the concern he has called a “post-division of labor social science,” the lecture reconsidered the disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences and the distance between the social sciences and the humanities. Professor Kwon in this way proposed a task that calls at once for interpretive freedom and analytical rigor, and as a possibility for Korean Studies to think the global Cold War and the Korean Peninsula together through the medium of area studies.