Translating Memory: Teaching Korean History in Global Classrooms

By Daniel Suh — Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto

To lecture on Korean history abroad is to translate not only language but memory. The classroom becomes a place where diaspora and homeland argue quietly, and where students learn that scholarship is never entirely neutral. For Korean academics working in international institutions, particularly those of us shaped by diasporic experience, this tension is not an abstract problem of historiography but a daily professional reality. We carry into the lecture hall multiple audiences at once: Korean colleagues and elders who scrutinise how faithfully we represent national experience, non-Korean students whose first sustained encounter with Korea may be our course, and a wider global academy still negotiating how to situate Korean studies beyond Cold War frameworks and Asia-Pacific security discourse.

Teaching Korean history to non-Korean students requires beginning not from assumed familiarity but from structured estrangement. Few of my undergraduates arrive with a clear sense of the longer historical continuities that lie behind contemporary headlines about North Korea, K-pop, or chaebol conglomerates. Establishing basic chronological and geographic scaffolding is therefore as important as introducing historiographical debates. Yet this explanatory work must avoid slipping into cultural caricature or civilisational shorthand. To describe late Chosŏn reform movements or colonial-era collaboration solely through the lens of Western modernisation theory is to risk flattening Korean agency; to overcorrect by appealing to an essentialised Korean uniqueness is to replace one distortion with another.

Political sensitivities sharpen these pedagogical challenges. Discussions of Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, or authoritarianism in the Republic of Korea inevitably intersect with students’ own national narratives and moral expectations. Some seek clear heroes and villains; others, trained to distrust nationalist histories, demand evidence of Korean complicity and ambiguity. Diaspora scholars often find themselves mediating between deeply felt Korean memories and the comparative scepticism of Western academic culture. In practical terms, this means foregrounding primary sources that allow students to encounter Korean voices on their own terms, while also being transparent about the historian’s task of selection, framing, and interpretation.

For those of us located in the Korean diaspora, the lecture hall can also be an unexpected site of self-interrogation. Our professional authority is linked to institutional affiliations in Toronto, London, or Sydney, yet our intellectual and emotional investments frequently turn back toward Seoul, Busan, or the provincial towns where our families once lived. Students often assume we speak “for” Korea, even as Korean-based colleagues sometimes regard our distance with suspicion. Navigating this dual gaze requires reflexivity about how migration, language proficiency, and educational trajectory shape our access to archives, networks, and research agendas. It also demands humility in acknowledging that no single scholar, at home or abroad, can fully represent the plurality of Korean historical experience.

Despite these frictions, diaspora historians occupy a potentially productive position as cultural and institutional bridges. We can introduce Korean scholarship, often published only in Korean-language journals, into broader comparative conversations on empire, development, or memory politics. At the same time, we can relay international theoretical debates back to Korean colleagues in ways that respect local concerns and institutional constraints. In an era when universities market themselves as “global” while tightening budgets for area studies, the ability to connect Korean history teaching with wider discussions of migration, race, and global capitalism may be crucial for sustaining Korean studies programmes.

The classroom, then, becomes more than a site for transmitting information about Korea; it is a laboratory for rethinking how knowledge about small and medium powers circulates in an asymmetrical academic world. When non-Korean students leave with a sense that Korean history complicates, rather than merely illustrates, familiar narratives of decolonisation or democratisation, the work of translation has achieved something meaningful. The hope is that such encounters extend beyond the seminar room into future research collaborations, policy debates, and public conversations. Readers and colleagues across the global Korean academic community are invited to reflect on how their own institutional locations shape the stories they tell, and to share those reflections in the ongoing dialogue that sustains our field.