Director's Message

Dear friends of the Center for Critical Korean Studies,

Vaxxed and masked, CCKS is ready for a new year! I am happy to report that, late in the spring term, we were awarded a Core University Grant from the Academy of Korean Studies. One of two universities in the United States and one of only seven in the world, this large five-year grant will be crucial in helping us achieve our mission goals: supporting our top-notch faculty in Korean Studies, offering opportunities for student learning at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and connecting with our community in Orange County, Southern California, and beyond. We also learned in the spring that we received a Korea Foundation grant to fund a new position in Korean Art History. The art history department will be conducting a search this academic year to fill this new position, and we are deeply excited about the impact that this new colleague will have on Korean Studies at UCI. So, even though we return to campus this fall with a great deal of caution, we also do so with a great deal of optimism. CCKS will continue to provide a robust schedule of events that, we hope, will be of interest to the campus community at large. We look forward to seeing you at events this year, which will hopefully be more and more in person.

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon
Professor of English
Director of CCKS