2025 Yale Korean Language and Studies Student Research Symposium

The Complex Construction of Religion in Korea

John G. Grisafi
Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Religious Studies PhD
3:15 - 3:25

The modern Korean word for religion, chonggyo, first appears with such usage in 1883. This is usually attributed to a borrowing of the Japanese word shūkyō, and scholars also credit American Protestant missionaries for teaching their concept of religion to Korean Christians. But these succinct explanations make the spread and development of the concept of religion in Korea appear to be a simple and straightforward matter of borrowing and acceptance. This presentation shows that the formation of religion in Korea was a more complex process, based on multiple imperial and religious influences and Korean agency, reflecting the subjectivity of religion.

South Korea’s Protectionist Economic Policies in E-Commerce: Historical Foundations, Contemporary Practices, and the Future South

Yeji Kim
Yale College 2025, East Asian Studies
3:30 - 3:40

South Korea's protectionist economic policies when it comes to e-commerce have enabled an e-commerce boom. This senior essay looks deeper into these policies, where they came from, and why they exist. I am also looking into what historical basis there is for this protectionist model and where protectionist policies do not apply (which are numerous--eg: semiconductors, smartphones, automobiles, fashion brands). Finally, this senior essay concludes by looking at the impact and implications of such policies in the future for the Korean people.

Across Agitated Waters: Anti-Americanism and Trans-Pacific Solidarities in the South Korean Minjung Movement

Mark Chung
Yale College 2025, History
3:40 - 3:50

In the decades following the Korean War, South Koreans grappled with their national identity and its intimate ties to U.S.-backed imperialism and militarism. Locating themselves within a greater system of the American Pacific empire, South Koreans resisted this hegemony in what is now known as the minjung movement (민주화 운동). This project explores the rhetorics of anti-Americanism and budding Third World solidarities through the lens of the minjung movement's cultural productions—including protest music (minjung gayo), grassroots publications, and poster culture. Through archival and historiographical analysis, this project complicates the ways minjung practitioners viewed nationalism, cultural imperialism, and transnational exchange.

Citrus Farming, Tourism, and Globalization: Jeju Island’s Transformation Under South Korea’s State-Led Development

Caitlin Hong
Yale College 2025, History
3:50 - 4:00

This thesis explores how Jeju Island’s economy was transformed through state-led development in the postwar period, focusing on the dual rise of citrus farming and tourism. Drawing on government documents, secondary sources, and ethnographic fieldwork—including interviews with local farmers—it traces how national policy redefined Jeju’s landscape, labor, and identity. Once a marginal island, Jeju became a laboratory for agricultural modernization and later a model for international tourism. This project examines the long-term impacts of these shifts, revealing how external forces continue to shape Jeju’s economy, environment, and sense of self in complex and often paradoxical ways.

I Write in the Wake: Toward a Korean American Feminist Consciousness with KAWA

Jenny Lee
Yale College 2025, Ethnicity, Race, & Migration
4:15 - 4:25

This autotheoretical project traces Korean American feminist consciousness as a formation shaped not by visibility or coherence, but by loss, illegibility, and affects of survival. Situating Korean American Women with Attitudes (1993) amid early 1990s sociopolitical rupture and the (im)possibilities of community, I engage the zine as anchor, method, and interlocutor—alongside personal vignettes and other texts —to examine how Korean American feminist thought emerges from state-sanctioned and intimate violences that produce loss, madness, and (dis)affect not as lack, but as epistemology. Together, we articulate "attitude" as a Korean American feminist consciousness that is necessarily cultural, abolitionist, and oriented toward desire.

Grief Across the Ocean: Racial Melancholia in Transpacific Theater

Sam Ahn
Yale College 2025, Comparative Literature
4:25 - 4:35

As South Korea becomes an increasingly racialized society, Anne Anlin Cheng’s theory of racial melancholia offers a powerful framework for understanding how grief structures both domination and resistance—not only in the United States but across the Pacific. This thesis reads Ping Chong’s Chinoiserie (1995) and Yun Mi-Hyeon’s Texas Aunt (2018) together to explore how racial melancholia shapes gendered dynamics across geography and racial hierarchy. While melancholic men seek to dominate women as compensation for lost power, melancholia reveals women’s resistance within structures of domination. In Texas Aunt, specifically, melancholia destabilizes the ethno-nationalist borders of han and unsettle essentialist ideas of race, gender, and national belonging.

John G. Grisafi recently completed a PhD in the Department of Religious Studies. His research focuses on the discursive and epistemic study of religion in modern Korea. Advised by Hwansoo Kim, his dissertation is on the "The Shaping of Religion through Empire in Modern Korea, 1876–1948."

Yeji Kim is a senior studying East Asian Studies. Her thesis advisor is Dr. Jonathan Feuer.

Mark Chung is a senior at Yale studying History with a focus on Asia and the Pacific. Raised in the confluence of Korean and American cultures, Mark grew up with a passion for tracing his family roots and heritage. Mark's academic interests include trans-Pacific cultural exchanges, postcolonial studies, and Korean/American intimacies. In his work, Mark aims to reframe the narratives of American militarism to center Third World-guided frameworks. His senior thesis was completed under the advisorship of Professors Gary Okihiro and Daniel Botsman.

Jenny Lee is a senior at Yale College, double majoring in Economics and Ethnicity, Race, & Migration. Her areas of focus include Asian American and Korean American studies, feminist literature, and critical disability studies. Her senior thesis was advised by Professor Kyunghee Eo.

Caitlin Hong is a senior studying History on the Politics, Law, and Government track. Her thesis advisor is Professor Hwansoo Kim.

Sam Ahn is a senior studying Comparative Literature. His thesis advisor is Kee-Yoon Nahm, Visitng Associate Professor at the David Geffen School of Drama's Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism.