Koreans in Cosmopolis - Intercultural Encounters in Late Chosŏn Korea

This 2-Day international conference brings together scholars from East Asia and north America to explore the impacts of cultural encounters across East Asia in the three centuries following the Injin War.

Friday, October 24, 2025
8:30 AM

Exploration Room, Luskin Conference Center (Friday, Oct. 24, 2025)
Room 243, Royce Hall (Saturday, Oct 25, 2025)

This conference examines cultural exchanges between Chosŏn Korea and East Asia from the 16th to the 19th centuries. It will revisit various moments in which the border-crossing travels of Korean to Qing China and Tokugawa Japan sparked new forms of human relations, political ideas, and textual practices. Encounters across state borders often meant violent confrontations involving armed forces, and the Imjin War (1592-1598) produced long-lasting memories of traumatic experiences in Chosŏn. In the new international order that emerged after the wars, however, the royal court of Chosŏn maintained formal diplomatic relations with Qing China and Tokugawa Japan. The regular and irregular diplomatic visits of Chosŏn envoys and literati to China and Japan were themselves the sources of extensive travel writings as literati works, and the stimuli for creative cultural productions on both sides of these borders.     

This 2-day conference brings together scholars form East Asia and North America to explore the impacts of cultural encounters across East Asia in the three centuries following the Imjin War. It also aims to foster critical conversations on methodological issues in the study of the literature and culture of Chosŏn Korea in the context of East Asia with a renewed sense of relevance to the contemporary crisis in the world order. 

For more information including schedule, and presenters, please visit the event website by clicking the link below.  

This is part of the "Koreans in the World" project hosted by UCLA's Center for Korean Studies. This event is supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS Award Number: AKS-2023-SRI-2200001) as part of its Strategic Research Institute Program for Korean Studies. 

koreansintheworld.humspace.ucla.edu/koreans-in-cosmopolis/

Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies

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