Deadline: January 10, 2017 (EST)
The Center of Korean Research
Online Submissions

Korea, Media, Archive: Rethinking Optics
International Affairs Building, Room 918
May 12-13, 2017

The organizers seek to convene a review and rethinking of mediated visuality in modern Korea. The conference begins with the assumption that new forms of seeing arose in confrontation with successive cultural and political forces (Japanese colonial, Soviet communist, American liberal capitalist, global neoliberal) and the advent of new technologies. These in turn conditioned new forms of cultural production across and between media as diverse as cinema, literature, visual art, public exhibitions, comic books, and digital media platforms. Optics is herein advanced as a conceptual tool to capture the social, material and epistemological turning points that are figured in these new works. We seek to investigate the impact of technologically and politically transformed ways of seeing on both the subjectivity of the viewer and the appearance of the viewed. Toward these ends, the conference maps out three broad and interrelated dimensions of mediated visuality in modern Korea: media archaeology, the lasting effects of the Cold War, and the idea of cosmopolitanism. While its concerns are grounded in the Korean 20th century, the intellectual scope of the conference must of necessity expand its vision to regional and intercontinental practices.

We invite papers that seek to trace the advent, circulation and consequences of these optics across media and historical borders. Ideas for topics may include but are not limited to:

1.Film and Media Archaeologies
2.Cold War Optics
3.Configuring the Cosmopolitan as Visual Politics

Papers presented at the conference should ideally be substantially developed. They will be given special consideration for inclusion in a volume that the organizers will edit and publish with a peer-reviewed press, with a late 2018 print target. With this aim in mind, the organizers will set deadlines for the submission of drafts ahead of the conference.

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief biographical note by January 10, 2017 to Steven Chung (sychung@princeton.edu) and Hyun Seon Park (hyunstime@yonsei.ac.kr).

Sponsored by the Center for Korean Research, Columbia University and the Center for Korean Visual Culture, Yonsei University

Co-sponsored by The Dorothy Borg Research Program, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University; The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University; Academy of Korean Studies, Seoul, Korea; The Office of Research Affairs/UIF, Yonsei University

Organizing Committee of Conference: Theodore Hughes, Columbia University; Steven Chung, Princeton University; Hyun Seon Park, Yonsei University

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT: http://ckr.weai.columbia.edu