This CSU faculty-led summer program takes students to Seoul, South Korea, in partnership with a US-based, non-profit study abroad provider CIEE’s Seoul branch located at Yonsei University. Prior to departure, students will study contemporary South Korean genre films with a focus on Bong Joon-ho’s and Park Chan-wook’s cinema (Memories of Murder, The Host, Parasite, Joint Security Area, etc.) in relation to various historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts of postcolonial South Korea (national division, civil war, U.S. neocolonialism, military dictatorships, the democratic minjung movement, and globalization). In Seoul, students will visit location sites of famous Korean films and dramas (the Demilitarized Zone, the Han River, the Seoul Tower, the Gyeongbok Palace, etc.) and develop independent study projects exploring history, culture, and national identity in South Korean cinema or television. There will several activities which allow CSU participants to meet local students and navigate Seoul with them through a walking tour, visits to cultural sites, and a riverside picnic.
Prerequisite
Sophomore standing. Required field trips. Credit allowed for only one of the following: HIST 370C, SPCM 370C, HIST 382C, or SPCM 382C.
Instructors
Hye Seung Chung
hye.chung@colostate.edu
Hye Seung Chung is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at CSU. She is native to Seoul and majored in English Literature at Ewha Womans University as an undergraduate. She received a Ph.D. in Film and Television from UCLA and taught at the University of Michigan, Hamilton College, the University of Hawaii, and Oakland University before joining CSU in 2011. She is the author of Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance (Temple University Press, 2006), Kim Ki-duk (University of Illinois Press, 2012) and Hollywood Diplomacy: Film Regulation, Foreign Relations, and East Asian Representations (Rutgers University Press, 2020), as well as the co-author of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2021). She is currently completing a new book manuscript titled Cinema under National Reconstruction: State Censorship and South Korea’s Cold War Film Culture based on her Fulbright research in Seoul in 2021-2022.
