James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies

CEAS event (April 23):
Love and Fear in North Korea: The Kim Dynasty's Cult of Personality
Jonathan Cheng, Wall Street Journal
5:15pm - 6:45pm | Annenberg School, ANNS 111 | 3620 Walnut St

Love and Fear in North Korea: The Kim Dynasty's Cult of Personality | Center for East Asian Studies Talk Synopsis: North Korea remains one of the most confounding geopolitical challenges that the world faces—and at its heart is a system that is deeply misunderstood. North Korea is a country, yes, but it is perhaps more properly understood as a religious society—one built around worship of its ...

Korean Animation Screening: Spring, Spring & When Buckwheat Flowers Bloom with Director Jae-hunn Ahn
Wednesday, April 22, 2026 - 5:30pm
Fisher Bennett Hall 401

Spring Spring (봄봄)
This animated film tells the story of a son-in-law struggling to overcome a series of obstacles on his path to marriage. Using the humorous style of writer Kim Yoo-jung combined with the melodies of pansori, the animation captures the unique rhythm and spirit of the original work.

When Buckwheat Flowers Bloom (메밀꽃 필 무렵)
Adapted from the 1936 short story by Lee Hyo-seok, the film lyrically follows traveling peddler Heo Saeng-won as he reflects on a lost love and gradually uncovers a fateful bond of kinship he cannot forget, set against a moonlit field of white buckwheat blossoms.

About the director
Jae-huun Ahn is the acclaimed director of the celebrated Korean animation studio Meditation with a Pencil. Best known for his Time Trilogy series and other Korean short films series based on 20th-century Korean fiction, he has won numerous awards, including for The Sharman Sorceress (2021), which received the Contrechamp Jury Distinction award at the 44th Annecy International Animation Film Festival.

Korean Animation Screening: Spring, Spring & When Buckwheat Flowers Bloom | James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies Co-sponsored Event Wednesday, April 22, 2026 - 5:30pm Fisher Bennett Hall 401 Spring, Spring & When Buckwheat Flowers Bloom Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2026 Time: 5:30 – 7:00 PM Location: Fisher Bennett Hall 401 Running Time: 50 minutes (25 minutes each) Post-screening Q&A with Director Jae-hunn Ah...

Book Talk with Serang Chung
April 10, 3:30pm - 5:00pm | Williams 623

Serang Chung (b. 1984) is a genre-defying Korean author who has been writing fiction since 2010 and screenplays since 2017. Widely regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Korean literature, she won the 7th Changbi Novel Award for This Much Close (2013) and the 50th Hanguk Ilbo Literary Award for Everybody Will Be Dancing (2017). Her notable works include Jain, Jaewook, Jaehoon, which follows three siblings with seemingly trivial superpowers, and The School Nurse Files, later adapted into a Netflix original series. Her books have been translated into more than twelve languages, and she also wrote an episode of Star Wars: Visions Season 2, expanding her work across mediums and audiences.

For more information, click here:

Book Talk with Serang Chung | East Asian Languages and Civilizations Join us for a book talk with bestselling South Korean author Serang Chung as we explore her vibrantly  multifaceted stories from See You in the Rooftop and the limitless imagination behind them.

First Korean Congress Celebration with the Philip Jaisohn Memorial Foundation

The program brought together three compelling talks: Professor Grace Kao’s Why You Should Care About K-Pop, Dr. Juman Kim’s lecture on Philip Jaisohn and the 1919 First Korean Congress in Philadelphia, and a UPenn KSA presentation on the vibrancy of student life at Penn.

The Kim Center Undergraduate Fellows participated in the Annual Korean Studies Undergraduate Exchange Conference, hosted by the USC Korean Studies Institute, along with Kim Center Director Hyunjoon Park and Emily Noh (AKS Postdoctoral Fellow).

- Isoken Umweni, “Media, Diplomacy and Representation: American Portrayals of Korea during the Park Chung Hee Era”
- Jiwoo Lee, “Hidden Cost Barriers: Why Many Korean Immigrants in the United States Delay or Avoid Healthcare Despite Living in a High-Spending System”
- Simone Punchak, “Understanding the Utilization of the U.S. Healthcare System from a Global Perspective: How South Korea’s Dual Medical Model Shapes Immigrant Healthcare Choices in the U.S”
- Enne Kim, “One Nation, Two Outcomes: Yemen, Korea, and the Threshold of Reunification”

Photos courtesy of USC Korean Studies Institute

Korean Studies Colloquium
Thursday, April 9, 2026 - 12:00pm
3600 Market Street, Suite 310

Irhe Sohn
Assistant Professor of Korean Language & Literature
Smith College

In this talk, I examine how failure structured the imagination of cinema in colonial Korea. Korean cinema under Japanese colonial rule was shaped by a condition of structural foreclosure such as industrial fragility, technological dependency, and political subordination. At the very moment when wartime regulation consolidated the film industry through the 1940 Korean Film Ordinance, the critic and writer Im Hwa turned to film theory to ask what Korean cinema could become. In a series of essays he penned between 1940 and 1942, Im advanced a paradoxical claim: the very feebleness of Korean cinema—its poverty, marginality, and inability to compete with Japanese production—might constitute the basis of its singularity. From his subtle rejection of the fantasy of industrial redemption, I will examine his theory of realism as affectively grounded in lived experience rather than technological and industrial mastery. For Im, cinema’s weakness was not simply a deficit to be overcome. It was a condition from which to dream otherwise. By revisiting Im Hwa’s wartime film theory, this talk rethinks colonial Korean cinema not as an incomplete national cinema but as a field of unrealized futurity. To write its history, I argue, is not to recover hidden seeds of later success but to attend to the promises embedded in its failures—the dreams that could not be realized under empire, yet continue to unsettle teleological narratives of national cinema.

Irhe Sohn is Assistant Professor of Korean at Smith College. As a historian of film and media, he seeks to situate Korean cinema and media within broader regional formations shaped by colonialism, Cold War geopolitics, and transnational circulation. Currently he is working on his book project on colonial Korean cinema, Promises of Failure: Dreams of Cinema in Colonial Korea.

Korean Studies Colloquium
Thursday, April 2, 2026 - 12:00pm
3600 Market Street, Suite 310

Prof. Ruth Barraclough
Korea Foundation Associate Professor of the Social Sciences
Columbia University

Some of the most fascinating and consequential characters of twentieth century Korea fell outside of history. Shunned by both north and south, their lives were unintelligible in state centered narratives and their archives scattered in former imperial metropoles in Russia, Japan and elsewhere. This talk is about a few of these characters and the journey to find what happened to them.

Ruth Barraclough is an historian of modern Korea with a focus on labor, gender, and literature. She is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Columbia University. From 2025 she is the new Director of the Center for Korean Research at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Come join us this Friday and Saturday for the Undergraduate Research Exchange Conference!! 📚✨

📅 March 27–28, 2026
📍 Ahn House

Celebrate innovative undergraduate research in Korean Studies and connect with scholars across different institutions.

🏫 Co-organized by USC, UMichigan, and UPenn.

🔗 Learn more: https://dornsife.usc.edu/ksi/ or check out our events calendar in our Linktree!

Book Talk with Serang Chung

Date & Time: Friday, April 10, 3:30-5:00 PM
Location: Williams 623
Discussant: So-Rim Lee, EALC

Presented by Korean Language Program (https://web.sas.upenn.edu/korean/)

Free and open to the public

https://forms.gle/qkNtiuHURmMquatU6

Join us for a book talk with bestselling South Korean author Serang Chung as we explore her vibrantly multifaceted stories from See You in the Rooftop and the limitless imagination behind them.

Serang Chung (b. 1984) is a genre-defying Korean author who has been writing fiction since 2010 and screenplays since 2017. Widely regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Korean literature, she won the 7th Changbi Novel Award for This Much Close (2013) and the 50th Hanguk Ilbo Literary Award for Everybody Will Be Dancing (2017). Her notable works include Jain, Jaewook, Jaehoon, which follows three siblings with seemingly trivial superpowers, and The School Nurse Files, later adapted into a Netflix original series. Her books have been translated into more than twelve languages, and she also wrote an episode of Star Wars: Visions Season 2, expanding her work across mediums and audiences.

Book Talk with Serang Chung RSVP Join us for a book talk with bestselling South Korean author Serang Chung as we explore her vibrantly multifaceted stories from See You in the Rooftop and the limitless imagination behind them. Serang Chung (b. 1984) is a genre-defying Korean author who has been writing fiction since 2010 and screen...

Penn Student Making Workshop
Korean Kites (Bangpae Yeon)
Penn Museum, Thursday, Apr. 2 2026, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm ET

This event will be hosted by the Penn Museum. If you have any questions about this event, please contact Jessica Lubniewski.