James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies celebrates opening with ribbon cutting ceremony

Penn held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sept. 12 to dedicate the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies. 

The Kim Center was the product of a $25 million donation from Penn graduate James Joo-Jin Kim and Agnes Kim of the James and Agnes Kim Family Foundation in 2022. Speakers at the event included Interim Penn President Larry Jameson and Associate Dean for Arts and Letters Jeff Kallberg.

The Kim Center's central goal is to promote an interdisciplinary approach to Korean Studies. Since the donation, the Kim Center has been able to set up programs to do just that.

The center established the Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellowship, which is open to scholars who are researching and teaching with a focus on contemporary Korea in the social sciences. The fellowship covers a 12-month period while providing a $57,000 stipend, and fellows may renew their funding for a second year. 

The fellowship is one step in the right direction to achieve Department Chair and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Christopher Atwood’s goals for the Kim Center moving forward. Atwood is one of five members of the Kim Center executive committee.

“We do have one professor in Korean Studies here at the East Asian Languages and Civilizations department,” Atwood said. “We feel we need another."

Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations So-Rim Lee is the sole professor of Korean Studies in the department and also sits on the executive committee of the Kim Center. Lee emphasized to The Daily Pennsylvanian how the Kim Center has been able to support her classes as well as serving as a bridge with Korean-related studies in other departments.

“As a center, it's something that bridges departments or between various career related researchers who are kind of strewn across different schools and departments at Penn,” Lee said. “So it's research-focused, but also a community center in many ways.”

The center is focused on academic questions related to Korea and the Korean diaspora on the global scale, but has also taken steps to get involved with the Korean community based in Philadelphia. 

For example, under Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center Hyunjoon Park’s leadership, the center has organized programs with the Philadelphia Museum of Art to focus on Korean contributions to art. 

“The Kim Center wants to highlight our engagement with the community in the Philadelphia area,” Park said. “For Korean American communities and Asian American communities, we think it's important for the Korean Studies Center to bring more cultural knowledge and awareness of Korea to the Philadelphia community.”

The Kim Center also hosts weekly Korean Studies Colloquiums that feature a wide variety of speakers that are open to all members of the Penn community. Speakers are experts in various fields including but not limited to sociology, literature, film, history, and economics.

“It's a blend of the scholarly research side of doing something Korean studies related with the community aspect of eating together and sharing your work,” Lee said. “But I would say that's like a constant thing that the Kim Center does to create community.”

Up next on the slate of talks is Associate Professor of Korean Studies at The Ohio State University Pil Ho Kim, who will be discussing “Adaptation as Arson: “Barn Burning” from William Faulkner to Murakami Haruki to Lee Chang-dong”.

“I want to really highlight this part: we offer very nice lunches at the Colloquium every Thursday,” Park said. “I wish our undergrad students knew more about this, so they’d come. They’ll learn a lot of interesting things about Korea too.”