Professor Robert Buswell, director of the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies, was quoted in several recent Korean-language articles about his election late last year to the presidency of the Association of Asian Studies. Buswell will assume that position in February 2008--the first Koreanist and first UCLA faculty member to do so--after a year as AAS vice president.
Readers of Korean may follow the links to the original articles, selected quotations from which are translated here.
"Korean Studies in the West has to this point has focused primarily on studies of modern and contemporary Korean history, politics, and society. As a premodernist myself, I hope to encourage the Korean government to offer more support to train graduate students in premodern Korea, so that Westerners will have a broader familiarity with the full range of Korean culture throughout history."
"In the history of the AAS, the vast majority of its presidents have come out of Chinese and Japanese Studies. I am the first scholar of Korea to have been elected, which is a sign of the maturation of the field of Korean Studies in American academe."
"I hope to encourage more interchanges between Western scholars of Korea and their Korean counterparts."
Korean-language coverage is available online from yonhapnews, naver.com, and joins.com (direct links to articles).
Published: Thursday, February 22, 2007