Seeds of Control: Toward a Timberline View of Japanese Colonial Rule in Korea

This talk will introduce the core arguments and interventions that animate Seeds of Control, one of the first English-language studies of the environmental impacts and legacies of Japan's colonial occupation of Korea. By outlining some of the central themes of the book, the author hopes to stimulate a broader conversation about green governmentality and colonial power, as well as the growth of Korean environmental history as a field.

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This event is on the record and open to the public.

Speaker

DAVID FEDMAN (left) is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea(University of Washington Press, 2020), which received the AHA Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and co-editor of Forces of Nature: New Approaches to Korean Environments (Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2022). His other publications include "The Ondol Problem and the Politics of Forest Conservation in Colonial Korea" (Journal of Korean Studies, Vol. 23, 2018), an energy history of Japanese settler colonialism in Korea.

Moderator

JISOO M. KIM (right) is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies and the Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center at GW. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She is a specialist in gender, law, and emotions in Korean history. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Sexual Desire, Crime, and Gendered Subjects: A History of Adultery Law in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

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