Infusing Institutes are content-centered programs that combine broad
introductions to Asian cultures and societies with more fine-grained
investigations, both of which are useful in developing humanities and social
science curriculum modules. In keeping with this, the presenting faculty with
both scholarly and teaching excellence in mind have been thoughtfully selected.
Presenting Faculty
Sang-Hyop LEE is Professor in the Department of Economics and Director of Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the East-West Center. He is also the Asian teams coordinator of the National Transfer Accounts project. His studies focus on population aging and social welfare issues. In particular, he has investigated the linkage between population aging and the labor market issues, with particular emphasis on Asian economies. Given its empirical and applied nature, a substantial portion of his research involves estimation of economic models using data sets.
He has published numerous articles including 11 edited books focusing issues on these research topics. His recent edited books include Aging, Economic Growth, and Old-Age Security in Asia (2011, Edward Elgar), Inequality, Inclusive Growth, and Fiscal Policy in Asia (2015, Routledge), Social Policies in an Age of Austerity (2015, Edward Elgar), and the Demographic Dividend and Population Aging in Asia and the Pacific (2016, special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing).
Sunyoung PARK is associate professor in the departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015). Her research is broadly focused on the literary and cultural history of modern and contemporary Korea, which she approaches from the varying perspectives of Marxism, postcolonial theory, transnational feminism, and cultural studies. In synergy with this research, Prof. Park is also active as an editor and translator of Korean fiction into English, which has resulted, among others, in the publication of two collections of short stories: On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea (Cornell East Asian Series, 2010) and Ready-Made Bodhisattva and Other Science Fiction Stories from South Korea (Kaya Press, 2019). She is currently at work on a monographic critical treatment of science fictional literature and film in South Korea during the last fifty years, and she is the editor of a forthcoming collection of critical essays titled Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea (University of Michigan Press, 2019).
Myungji YANG is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. She earned her PhD in Sociology in 2012 and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Korean Studies Institute, University of Southern California, in 2015-16. Her research interests include the political economy of development, class politics and social inequality, democracy and civil society, globalization, and East Asia. Her work on the urban middle class and democracy in South Korea has appeared in Sociological Inquiry, Critical Asian Studies, and Korea Observer. Her first book, From Miracle to Mirage: The Making and Unmaking of the Korean Middle Class, 1960-2015, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. Capturing the emergence, reproduction, and fragmentation of the Korean middle class, it demonstrates how the seemingly successful state project of building a middle-class society contained the seeds of that society’s decline. It argues that the current fragility of the middle class was embedded in the very development strategies and speculative urbanism that led its rise in the first place. She is now working on a new project about conservative politics and activism in South Korea. She is interested in how the right wing has maintained its hegemonic power and how it has shaped the post-democratization trajectory in Korea.