Ewha Institute for the Humanities opens the 7th Ewha-Yale Academic Conference
- Date2023.06.01
- 7737
On May 26th, Ewha Institute for the Humanities (Director Jinhee Kim) opened the ‘7th Ewha-Yale Academic Conference' at the school's museum.
The 'Ewha-Yale Academic Conference' is sponsored by Hansae Yes24 Foundation and is opened every year by the Ewha Institute for the Humanities and Yale University's Council on East Asian Studies(CEAS). Since 2014, Ewha Institute for the Humanities has held academic conferences based on Northeast Asian culture with Yale University. From 2019, they have been opened every year through an agreement with Hansae Yes24 Foundation, and deep discussions about north/southeast Asian culture and history has been going on at these conferences.
This event took place at the museum's auditorium. About ninety people attended, including Director Jinhee Kim of Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Proffesor Hwansoo Kim (Director of Yale's CEAS), Chief Chairman Youngsoo Jo and concerned parties of Hansae Yes24 Foundation, Director Namwon Jang of the museum, and Professor Emeritus Hongnam Kim(the museum's former director).
Director Jinhee Kim of Ewha Institute for the Humanities said, “The Ewha-Yale Academic Conference has made meaningful research results with the subject of east Asian culture, gender, environment, ecology, life etc. In this year’s conference, many institutions cooperated, such as the school’s museum, the Department of History’s education and research team of local·global history, and the material and culture research team of the Korean Cultural Studies Institute, in order to make the conference into a more abundant and meaningful event." Proffesor Hwansoo Kim emphasized, “This academic conference that Yale and Ewha Institute for the Humanities have been holding since 2014, is the most meaningful academic cooperative relationship that Yale has maintained for a long time.” He also revealed, “I hope the research questions brought up in this year’s conference will be reborn into follow-up studies that contribute to the development of Asian humanities.”
The conference’s subject was called ‘Asia and matter connected from beyond: the merging of matter for new ecological techniques.’ It started out with Professor Laurel Kendall’s keynote lecture and consisted of a total of nine presentations and debates in the next three sessions, △Added Layers and Hues △Shifting and Reshaping Boundaries △Knowledgeable Things, Multispecies Realities.
Dr. Laurel Kendall is a professor of Columbia University and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. She has been studying Korean folk religions since the 1970s and has written several books about Korean religions and folk artwork, such as 『Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits』. In this year’s conference, she co-researched with President Ni Wayan Pasek Ariati of the University of Indonesia on the topic of ‘A Balinese Temple Mask—Connecting and Mixing Up.’ It was about the masks and religious rituals of the Bali temples.
In the next sessions, the following made presentations about the fascinating journey of various objects that go beyond East Asia: Manager Erik Harms of Yale’s CEAS and 3 presenters of Yale University; 5 presenters from the Ewha Institute for the Humanities, the material and culture research team of the Korean Cultural Studies Institute, and the Institute of World and Global History; and art history · science history · anthropology · history experts such as Kuangchi Hung from National Taiwan University. Also, there were debates in each session where plentiful academic exchanges occurred. They were carried out by Professor Jeongeun Lee of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Professor Jongho Kim of Seogang University, and Dr. Hanah Seong of KAIST Center for Anthropocene Studies.