Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U Hawaii Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections between cultural production, identity, and persuasive messaging that idealized inclusion and unity across Japan’s East Asian empire (1895–1945). Japanese propagandists drew on a pan-Asian rhetoric that …

Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how se…

Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased attention to the concept of pan-Asianism. Most of that discussion, however, lacks any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. In Pan-Asianism and t…

In this beautiful new book, Dr. Youngna Kim draws on her vast understanding of Korean art to provide an overview of the peninsula’s contemporary art scene. Korean artists have become increasingly active at an international level, with many being invited for residencies and exhibitions all over the world. Nonetheless, for various reasons, the genera…

South Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilisation: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024) by Dr. Joan E. Cho takes a closer look at the history of South Korea to show that Korea’s advance to democra…

How do election campaigns in South Korea look like? Why have satellite parties become an important instrument of power politics? What do the election results mean for the Yoon government’s ability to implement its policy agenda? In April 2024, South Koreans went to the polls to elect a new parliament but many regarded the elections also as a refere…

Histories of North Korea typically focus on one man — Kim Il Sung — and one narrative — his grand rise to absolute power. Andre Schmid’s new book, North Korea's Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953-1965 (University of California Press, 2024), tells a much more complex and richly textured story. Moving away from the…

Dr. SunAh M. Laybourn’s Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants (NYU Press, 2024) explores the experiences of Korean adoptees, the largest population of adult transnational adoptees in the United States. Over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted into primarily white US families since the 1950s, and despite being raised as US citiz…

Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a look at how the Broadway musical travels the world, influencing and even transforming local practices and traditions. It traces especially how the musical has been indigenized in South Korea and Germany, the commercial centers for Broadway musicals in East Asia and contine…

“The things that are happening to North Korea are happening to all of us…they are part of the human community. To say that this is just a problem for North Korea is to say that North Koreans are not part of the human community.” In her new book, Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record (Columbia University Press, 20…

Dr. Andy Jackson’s The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) examines an unexplored area of South Korean cinema history – the 1985-1997 growth of art film exhibition, consumption, and cinephilia. This moment of heightened interest in art film altered how many Koreans conceptualis…

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within famil…

Even in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as Alyssa Park’s book Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) show…

Analysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women's active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated …

In August, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to complain about how U.S. regulations are holding local sunscreens back compared to the rest of the world. And while she didn’t name any specific country, the video featured headlines that did name one nation: South Korea. On social media, Korean cosmetics are now viewed as the wor…

Migration is a theme intertwined with hopes and dreams. In Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke UP, 2023), June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea s…

Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul (MIT Press, 2023) challenges the popular image of the international student in the American imagination, an image of affluence, access, and privilege. In this provocative book, higher education scholar Stephanie Kim argues that universitie…

From the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new i…

Sae, former journalist turned a young mother of two in 1992 Seoul, is waiting for her husband, an engineer for a small construction company. He’s late. A neighbor rushes down with the news: a high-rise downtown has collapsed, trapping hundreds inside–the same high-rise that Sae’s husband is working. That disaster, which parallels the real-life Samp…

“[W]hat is our relationship to the Korean War and to the affinities” of different institutions that produce knowledge about the Korean War? (130) In her book, Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War (Temple UP, 2022), Joo Ok Kim “conceptualizes racialized formations of kinship emerging from the Korean War as a problem of knowledge” (…

Before South Korea became the democracy and media powerhouse that it is today, it underwent several decades of authoritarian rule during the Cold War from the late 1940s to late 1980s. Amidst this authoritarian period, South Korea’s filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors nevertheless found ways to push the boundaries of both cinema and politics. …

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found …

In Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2023), Suzy Kim follows Korean women’s engagement in a broader international women’s movement from the beginnings of the Korean War in the 1940s until International Women’s Year in 1975. Obscured by layers of “cascading erasures,” the communist women of Nort…

K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge, 2022) is about K-pop dance and the evolution and presence of its dance fandom on social media. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, choreography, and participation-observation with 40 amateur and professional K-pop dancers in New York, California, and Seoul, the book …

Today I talked to Don J. Wyatt about his book Slavery in East Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022). In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to …

An ethnography of advertising in postmillennial South Korea, Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads (U Hawaii Press, 2022) details contests over advertising freedoms and obligations among divergent vested interests while positing far-reaching questions about the social contract that governs advertising in late-capitalist soc…

Xiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo, and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast—but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century—Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, e…

The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there. Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agree…

Dr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars in her new book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023). In the nineteenth century, Russ…

As a member of the U.S. National Security Council, Victor Cha flew over the DMZ separating North and South Korea in 2007, following negotiations with Pyongyang. He writes in Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale University Press, 2023)—his latest book with co-author, and previous podcast guest, Ramon Pacheco Pardo—about how he was struck by…

In Surviving Squid Game: A Guide to K-Drama, Netflix, and Global Streaming Wars (Applause Books, 2023), scholar Suk-Young Kim reflects on Netflix's most-viewed series and one of the most influential Korean dramas, Squid Game. The series premiered in September 2021, when the pandemic cloud still hung heavy over viewers and seemed to mirror the socie…

Mark Madden and Tim Benz ask if Pirates players and fans should be out in the toxic wildfire smoke clogging Pittsburgh's air. And how can this team find ways to improve in the near future? Subscribe to the Mark Madden: Unfiltered Podcast, presented by BetRivers.By BetRivers Network

Mark Madden and Tim Benz recap the 2023 NHL awards and ponder the Penguins' future.By BetRivers Network

Mark Madden and Tim Benz discuss NHL goalie Tom Barasso finally reaching the Hall of Fame. Barasso helped the Penguins win back-to-back Stanley Cups in 1991 and 1992.By BetRivers Network

Mark Madden and Tim Benz dive into pop culture, including their takes on sports movies of this century. Why have recent sports movies been so poor compared to older releases?By BetRivers Network

Tim Benz and Tom Opferman discuss Taylor Swift's conquest of Pittsburgh. And they break down the Pirates' continuing struggles.By BetRivers Network

Tim Benz and Tom Opferman discuss the passing of Pittsburgh media legend Stan Savran, who spent nearly five decades in television and radio. They also offer their thoughts on the Pirates' upcoming series vs the Cubs.By BetRivers Network

Mark Madden and Tim Benz discuss the Pirates' disappointing series loss to the abysmal Oakland A’s.By BetRivers Network

Mark Madden and Tom Opferman discuss Andrew McCutchen and his impact on the MLB. Is his recent revival just a reminder that he's overrated?By BetRivers Network

The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (Oxford UP, 2023) traces how American ideas about race in the Pacific were made and remade on the imperial stage before World War II. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the United States cultivated an amicable relationship with Japan based on the…

Mark Madden and Tim Benz discuss the Penguins' hiring of Kyle Dubas as president of hockey operations. How will Dubas leverage his new powers during the offseason?By BetRivers Network

Monica Macias, the youngest daughter of Equatorial Guinea’s first president at just seven years old, lands in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1979. Her father had sent her to the country to study, but what was meant to be a shorter visit grew to a decade-long stay when her father was ousted in a coup. Monica stays in Pyongyang until 1994, when she gradua…

Mark Madden digs into Penguins' offseason questions. What sort of roster moves should Pittsburgh make? Tom Opferman joins the show to discuss hockey and more.By BetRivers Network

Welcome to the fourth NIAS-Korea episode. We invite Dr. Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein to discuss Sweden-North Korea relations. It may seem odd that among the Western countries, Sweden is the one that has maintained friendlier relations with North Korea. For example, Sweden was the first Western country that opened an embassy in Pyongyang, and the em…

Tim Benz joins Mark Madden to talk the latest with Pittsburg sports. Plus, their thoughts on the NHL playoffs.By BetRivers Network

Mark Madden offers his NHL playoffs MVPs so far this postseason. And he discusses the Penguins' GM search with Tom Opferman.By BetRivers Network

Mark Madden and Tim Benz ponder the consequences of perpetual college football conference shakeups. Plus, their thoughts on the ongoing Penguins GM search.By BetRivers Network

Mark Madden and Tom Opferman discuss what value Mason Rudolph brings to the Steelers, and how his new contract will affect Mitch Trubisky and Kenny Pickett.By BetRivers Network

Tim Benz and Tom Opferman step in for Mark Madden. You'll hear their thoughts on NHL playoff action and the Pirates' recent losing streak.By BetRivers Network

Mark Madden and Tom Opferman discuss the biggest weaknesses in the current Steelers lineup. How will this roster stack up in the AFC next season? Plus, an update on the Pirates, who just snapped a seven-game skid.By BetRivers Network