A History of Korean Science and Technology_Jeon_Author_Carrubba_Lee_Translator

East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2018

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Korea Journal, 2022

This special issue, titled "Korean Science since the Colonial Period: Environment, Medicine, and Technology in Transwar Korea, " is intended to spark an academic conversation between Korean history of science and Korean studies. Despite the recent surge of interest in the subjects of science, technology, and public health in the field of Korean studies, little interaction has been made between the two fields. Aiming to promote the history of science as a form of intervention, this introductory essay charts the institutional history of this field and the possible benefits that it can provide to Korean studies in terms of generating new insights.

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Presented in AAS, Hawaii, 2011

Published in Korean as 임종태, "한국과학의 정체성을 찾아서": 1960-1970년대 전상운 선생의 한국 과학기술사 서술" <한국과학사학회지> 40(1) (2018), 159-173.

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Korean Studies, 1982

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EASTS, 2020

As they were in other East Asian countries, Joseph Needham and his monumental works were warmly received by Korean historians of science in the late twentieth century. Korean historians appreciated both Needham’s pioneering research on the history of Chinese science and his praise of Korea’s contribution to East Asian scientific tradition, as expressed, for example, in the addenda to volume 3 of Science and Civilisation in China. But the Koreans’ praise of Needham was not unqualified. Needham’s largely favorable remarks on Korean science invited criticism from several prominent Korean historians who noted many factual errors, particularly relating to Korea’s priority over China in several technological inventions. They regarded those errors as indicative of Needham’s deep-rooted historiographical bias, his view of Korea as a mere tributary of China’s scientific tradition. But the Koreans’ criticism of Needham ironically shows that they agreed with the central tenets of Needham’s methodology of crediting scientific achievements to different civilizations, whereby to measure China’s contribution to what Needham termed “universal modern science.” The Koreans only scaled down the scope of comparison from the world of civilizations to a smaller region called East Asia, whereby to compare Korea’s share with that of China. This article thus takes the Korean criticism of Needham as an illuminating case, which invites us to think over a less explored issue in the history of East Asian science: how to write a balanced history of science in a region that is characterized by a stark disparity in power, resources, and achievements between China and its smaller neighbors.

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Development and Society, 2017

The Korean studies literature consistently points out that science and technology have played an important role in the rapid socioeconomic transformation of South Korea. But the emphasis in this literature is placed predominantly on their contributions to the nation's industrial performance. Questions such as what type of policies and institutional reforms have been introduced to facilitate these contributions and how successful they have been are frequently asked. Science, technology, and development per se are, nevertheless, generally conceived as politically neutral and seldom interrogated. However, Korea has a long cultural tradition that envisions science and technology as tools for national empowerment. This instrumental view of science and technology has served as a crucial constitutive element of nationalist developmentalism that defines 'advanced/developed' and 'backward/underdeveloped' primarily in terms of industrialization and economic growth. In the South, it was under the Park Chung Hee regime that a more concrete form of nationalist developmentalism emerged and became firmly entrenched across the country. By reviewing the historical genealogy of the official and popular discourses of science, technology, and development in South Korea, the present paper traces how the nation's prevailing conceptions of the meanings, purposes, and roles of science and technology have embedded and been embedded in distinctive ideas of nationhood and development.

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2008

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The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature edited by Heekyoung Cho, 2022

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Journal of Korean Studies, 2008

Page 1. 84 kOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 3i Economic and institutional histories are given less treatment than one might ex-pect in a survey history. He also devotes less space to topics of interest to so-cial historians such as the ...

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