News Archive

A fermented cabbage dish and a crazy dance video have elevated Korean culture to dizzying heights of popularity.

A year ago, not many people in Perth had eaten kimchi and nobody outside Korea knew what Gangnam Style was.

Now they are the flavour of the year - and big enrolments in UWA's new elective in Korean language and culture reflects the trend.

The new Associate Professor in Korean Studies, Jo Elfving-Hwang, is as interesting as her name suggests. Brought up in Finland but a long-term resident in the UK, she started reading about Korea when she had a Korean housemate while living in Wales.  She found the language and the culture fascinating, then met her Welsh-Korean husband in Swansea.

A PhD in Korean literature led to her teaching Korean literature and society at the University of Sheffield and a position as Director of Korean Studies at the University of Frankfurt.

Her position is mostly funded by the Korea Foundation, a government-backed cultural organisation that sponsors Korea-related academic and cultural activities in foreign countries.  A/Professor Elfving-Hwang has joined Associate Professor Kyu-Suk Shin, who set up Korean Studies in the Arts faculty in 2011 and who is one of the most established and respected Korean language educators in Australia.

"A significant number of the students who have enrolled for the Korean Studies elective are science students," she said. "Learning a language requires a surprisingly similar skillset to that needed to study science. And it is so beneficial to both science and humanities students for their communication skills.

"Korea is WA's third biggest business partner and among the top 20 economies in the world, so there will be lots of jobs for graduates with a cultural competency.

"At this level, it is more than language training; it is about thinking critically and understanding different concepts. There are different ways of knowing and perception in the world and to become an international cross-cultural communicator you have to be able to see and understand that there are many valid ways of knowing beyond Western epistemes."

"When we say Korea, it is always assumed that we mean South Korea," she said. "But the situation in North Korea certainly makes Korean Studies such an interesting field."

Korea was ‘annexed' by Japan from 1910 until 1945, when the Allies declared victory in the Pacific War. "The Korean peninsula was decimated by the civil war in 1950-53, which left the country divided.  Both the South and North were completely war-ravaged and poverty-stricken. Most of the people in South Korea had to flee their homes at some point, and many lost everything they had.

"To go from complete destruction to being one of the world's biggest economies in that short time is amazing. Giving students the opportunity to study and understand what got the Korean people through the 20 ^th century makes Korean Studies equally intriguing."

But for those who just want a little taste of Korean culture and a sense of humour, A/Professor Elfving-Hwang recommends finding on YouTube the next big musical hit, a Korean Air Force spoof on Les Miserables !