AU Korea will be hosting an online event discussing the ways in which the North Korean regime filters and re-interprets various ‘messages’ from the outside world for its domestic audience through the lens of state-produced literature.
Featured Speakers
Dr. Meredith Shaw is an associate professor in the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo and the managing editor of Social Science Japan Journal. Her work, which has been supported by a grant from the Fulbright Foundation, examines cultural politics and state efforts to manipulate culture in East Asia. Her research has been published in Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Pacific Review, and Journal of East Asian Studies, and she has also written for The National Interest, Global Asia and The Diplomat. Dr. Shaw worked for several years as a research assistant and translator at the Korea Institute for National Unification before obtaining a Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from University of Southern California. She was a 2019 Korea-US NextGen Scholar and is in the inaugural cohort of the Mansfield-Luce Asia Scholars Network. In her spare time, she maintains the North Korean Literature in English blog project (http://dprklit.blogspot.com/).
Junki Nakahara is a PhD candidate at American University’s School of Communication. Her research focuses on nationalism and xenophobia in East Asian contexts, critical and cultural studies, feminist media studies, and international relations. Her research has been published in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus and New Media & Society. She has recently contributed a book chapter to Sanctions as war: Anti-imperialist perspectives on American geo-economic strategy (Edited by S. Davis and I. Ness, 2021). Nakahara received her B.Ed. degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Tokyo and her M.A. in Intercultural and International Communication from American University.
About the Moderator
Dr. Ji-Young Lee is an Associate Professor of International Relations and the C. W. Lim and KF Professor of Korean Studies at American University’s School of International Service. She is the author of China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (Columbia University Press, 2016). Currently, she is working on her second book project, The Great Power Next Door: The Past and Present of Chinese Military Intervention in the Korean Peninsula (under contract with Columbia University Press). She previously taught at Oberlin College as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. Outside academia, she served as the Korea Policy Chair and a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, and was a non-resident James Kelly Korean Studies Fellow at the Pacific Forum CSIS.