A contingent of Yale faculty and staff members traveled to Seoul to participate in the 7th annual Yale-Ewha Conference that took place in late May. The yearly tradition gathers faculty from both institutions to present research related to each year’s theme and discuss their findings. This year’s theme was titled “Connected Things In and Beyond Asia: Mixing Things Up for New Eco-Techne.”

The conference, sponsored by the Ewha Institute for the Humanities and Yale’s Council on East Asian Studies, was among Yale’s first engagements with a Korean university and began with an inaugural collaboration in 2014 led by Yale alumnus and Ewha Law professor, Eunice Kim (BA ‘82; JD ‘86), and Yale professor emeritus of East Asian languages and literatures, John Treat (MA ‘79; PhD ‘82). The conference is held alternatly at each of the two institutions’ campuses, with this year’s conference marking the first returning to in-person since the beginning of the pandemic.

Hwansoo Kim, the chair of Yale’s Council on East Asian Studies, delivered the opening remarks and touched on the significance of this collaboration between Yale and Ewha Womans University saying, “the academic partnership between these two institutions has been the most enduring and successful among all the programs initiated by Yale. This achievement can be attributed to the passion and dedication of the faculties from both universities, who ensure the incorporation of creative themes in each conference, as exemplified in this year’s event.”

The faculty lecture presentations were divided into three sessions, each one highlighting a different focus of the larger theme. In the first session, titled “Added Layers and Hues,” Denise Leidy, the Ruth and Bruce Dayton Curator of Asian Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, presented a lecture on clay and glass in East and West Asia. 

In the following session, themed “Shifting and Reshaping Boundaries,” professor of anthropology and Southeast Asia studies, Erik Harms, presented his talk, “Shadows of Saigon: How to be cool in a hot city.” Following Harms, postdoctoral associate in the Department of History, Eilin Rafael- Perez, shared his research in a lecture titled, “Envisaging Koreas: Historicizing Projections of Progress Across Cold War Divides.”

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To learn more, visit the conference website.