This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Michael Kim. They speak about the arrival and place of Western missionaries in Korea before Japanese colonisation, the confrontations and accommodations that occurred between the missionaries and the colonial state, the system of ‘officially’ recognising religions within colonial Korea, and how the missionaries became institutionalised through social work; they also speak about the struggles that the...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Albert Park. They speak about the history of agriculture in Korea, the important place that farmers traditionally held within the economy and the society, what agrarian life in Korea has looked like and how it has changed, the impact of colonial rule and modernisation, the introduction of cooperative models, the role of government and the strained power-dynamic between them and the farming sector,...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Tycho van der Hoog. They speak about the National Heroes’ Acre monuments in Namibia and Zimbabwe, how these North Korean-built monuments ended up there, the history and extent of such North Korean influence and presence in southern Africa, the public history and political culture that ties such countries to North Korea, and importantly how (and why) the history of the liberation movements – and how...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with John Bocskay. They take a walking tour of the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan while speaking about the construction and maintenance of the cemetery, the design and its purpose, the important landmarks, the unique history of the site as the only United Nations cemetery in the world, and the way in which it honours the history of the Korean War and the memories of the soldiers who fought and...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Leighanne Yuh. They speak about the tumult and geopolitical pressures within the Late-Choson dynasty, the growing influence of foreign powers, the forced opening of the country to international trade, the tensions between the old Confucian order and the need to rapidly reform, the motivations and concerns that led to the introduction of Western-style education, the reach and impact of the Kabo...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Sean King. They speak about the long running analogy and lessons that are drawn between German reunification and the hopes of Korean reunification, the origins and causes of each division, the impact and placements of these countries within the Cold War order, the degrees to which information and outside influence managed to permeate each country, the important geographical and other differences...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Minsoo Kang. They speak about the Record of the Virtue of Queen Inhyeon, Lady Min, the importance of this story in both Korean history and continuing into the present day, the historical context of the story and the central characters during this period in the Joseon Dynasty, the representation of womanhood and womanly virtues, who the likely author was and why the story was written, the historical...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Meredith Shaw. They speak about how the North Korean regime deals with and re-interprets “messages” from other countries and international institutions, what the state-produced literature that deals with this messaging looks like, the three main types of these foreign messaging interactions: 1. Economic sanctions. 2. Summit diplomacy. 3. Military exercises/fleet movements, how the Korean Writer’s...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Ellie Choi. They speak about the author Yi Kwangsu, his place as an independence writer and his influence on the March First anti-Japanese demonstrations, the style of writing he employed and the themes that ran through his work, his views on the modernisation of Korea, how he saw and influenced the development of Korean nationalism, the important place that he held within the colonial literary...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Daniel Pieper. They speak about the Korean script ‘Hangul’, its history and development, the terminology and influences from Japan and China, the way in which language became a symbol of national pride and civilizational enlightenment, the structure of Hangul, the power inherent within the use of language and its impact on thought, the way that the Japanese colonial period and the repression of the...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Kim Sunghee. They speak about North Korea’s ‘military-first’ ideology, the historical period from which it emerged, what the ideology entails, the transformation that took place in the minds of everyday North Koreans, the way that workers and soldiers became indistinguishable, how this ideology was developed through literature, what this literature looked like and the affect that it had, and...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Bruce Fulton. They speak about the history of Korean literature, its origins as performative and oral works, the lyrical songs of the Koryo period, an overview of classical Korean literature, how the shift into verse happened and what it looked like, the rise of narrative fiction, the centrality of classical Chinese writing in this early literature, the development of modern literature and how this...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Bruce Fulton. They speak about the history of Korean literature, its origins as performative and oral works, the lyrical songs of the Koryo period, an overview of classical Korean literature, how the shift into verse happened and what it looked like, the rise of narrative fiction, the centrality of classical Chinese writing in this early literature, the development of modern literature and how this...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Janet Lee. They speak about the Chosŏn-era ‘Tale of Chunhyang’, why this story was so popular at the time and why it remains so today, the portrayal of social stratification within this novel, the rebellious message embedded in the text, the various different source texts that exist for this story, the two key English translations that were done by the now-famous Western Missionaries Horace Allen and...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Brother Anthony of Taizé. They speak about the history and origins of Korean poetry, the imagery that is often used by Korean poets, the structure and form that Korean poetry follows, the difficulties and challenges of translating from Korean to English, how Korean poetry has changed over time, the lives and works of selected Korean poets, and importantly Brother Anthony’s experience within this...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Franklin Rausch. They speak about the Choson dynasty classic tale ‘The Story of Changhwa and Hongnyon’, the origins of this story in the 17th century, its popularity and the subject matter, how the story has changed over time, the earliest English translations, how during the Japanese colonial period the tale revives and becomes central to Korean national identity and a symbol of the daily suffering...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Immanuel Kim. They speak about his translation and analysis of Nam-Nyong Paek’s Friend, the context in which the novel was first published in North Korea, the change that literature like this was trying to make away from the Socialist Realist tradition, the new subtleties and styles that this new wave of writing embodied, the important ways that the everyday was portrayed in the novel, the...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Jerome de Wit. They speak about literature during the Korean War period, the writers that worked on both sides of the battlelines, the formation of war ideology, the institutionalisation of the process, the motivations for writing during the war, the issues and challenges involved in trying to find the appropriate message, the ability of this literature to capture emotions and rouse the reader to...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Janet Poole. They speak about Korean literature in the late-colonial period, the unique group of writers that emerged at this time, how they dealt with both censorship and the feeling of inevitability about Japanese rule, what the stories of this period looked like and the themes that tended to emerge, the depictions of the future and the everyday, the place of modernity and nostalgia, what Korean...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Ross King. They speak about the landscape of Korean-to-English literary translation, the rise in interest over the past few years and support for the practice, how such translation can be taught and the challenges that exist within the field, the organisations that support and fund this translation, the bureaucratic and underlying assumptions behind this funding and support, the misplaced resistance...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Ayse Naz Bulamur. They speak about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, the different analytical interpretations of the novel, the importance of the text and how people have come to understand it over time, the role that emotion plays in building the characters, the blend between prose, poetry, autobiography, historical text, and story-telling, the experimental nature of the novel, the way that time plays...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Minsoo Kang. They speak about The Story of Hong Gildong, the importance of this story in both Korean history and continuing into the present day, the origins of the Hong Gildong character in the Joseon Dynasty, the understanding of this character as a ‘noble robber’ in the same archetype as Robin Hood, the historical myths and scholarly inaccuracies that have changed most peoples’ conceptions of the...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Ben Young. They speak about the 1976 Axe Murder Incident inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the geopolitical context in which this happened, the history of conflict between America and North Korea, the 1968 capture of the USS Pueblo, how the cutting down of a tree inside the Joint Security Area (JSA) sparked the murders, the crisis that this created on both sides of the border, the very real risk...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Jay Song. They speak about the North Korean defector community, the importance of their voices and activism in applying pressure to the regime in Pyongyang over the country’s human rights violations, how defector-activists form networks, the different niches that they create, the transnational dimensions of these networks, the co-evolution that happens between defectors and NGO’s etc., the North...

This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Stephen Nagy. They speak about the impact of coronavirus on East Asia, how the crisis has affected relationships in the region, the opportunities that it originally presented for deeper cooperation, the failure of leadership from Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, how Japan are dealing with the crisis, the substantive links between China’s response to the current moment and that with recent challenges in...