The Harvard Conference on Koguryŏ History and Archaeology
Announcement
The Korea Institute at Harvard University will be hosting an international forum titled The Harvard Conference on Koguryŏ History and Archaeology, a two and one-half day symposium featuring presentations by Koguryŏ specialists from six countries. The conference will take place April 5-7, 2005 at the Harvard University Faculty Club, and will be a closed forum (but open to anyone with a Harvard ID).
The primary purpose of this conference is to facilitate the introduction of Koguryŏ-based studies in the English language. Although there have been a few valuable scholarly articles on Koguryŏ in English, there are, to date, no comprehensive treatments on Koguryŏ or works that approach various aspects of Koguryŏ history and culture from multiple disciplines. This is a notable deficiency, not only for scholars of Korean history, but also for those who study and teach the history of East Asia as a whole. One of the long-term goals of this conference, therefore, is to help provide a foundation for Koguryŏ studies in the English language.
Koguryŏ’s prominence in newspaper headlines in recent months reminds us that even today, with nationalism on the rise in East Asia and elsewhere, the ancient past is still very much pertinent. The past is viewed in many different ways, and recent editorials and commentaries, including some in English, have inundated us with confused and contradictory information regarding Koguryŏ, much of it offered by writers with little actual knowledge of the fields of history and archaeology. This proliferation of misinformation regarding Koguryŏ threatens to compound the problems facing western scholars who wish to include Koguryŏ in their research or curricula. We have therefore invited Koguryŏ specialists trained in the fields of history and archaeology to present the material that is central to their own research. And though we anticipate differences of opinion and engaging academic debate, the presentations offered at the conference are expected to represent informed and balanced scholarship.
Presentations at the conference will include discussions of Koguryŏ’s origins and development, its inter-regional relations, its tomb structure and art, and its archaeological remains. Other presentations will focus on sources for Koguryŏ history and archaeology, Koguryŏ in historiography, and the modern history of scholarly work on Koguryŏ. Papers prepared for this conference will be compiled into an edited volume, so that they will be made more broadly available.
The conference is made possible by the generous support of the Korea Foundation of Seoul Korea, the Korea Society in NY, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Harvard Asia Center, the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.
