Newsletters

2022-2023 has seen some exciting changes to the Centre’s operations and we’re excited to announce that KRC has relocated Curtin University’s Bentley campus in Perth. With the generous support of the Academy of Korean Studies, KRC will continue to fulfil its original mission to be the hub for Korea-focused research, teaching and industry engagement in Western Australia and the region from our new base.

Looking back to a busy 2022, we saw a full Korean Studies major and minor re-established at Curtin University, which was originally one of the first Universities in Australia to offer Korean at tertiary level from the early 1990s. We’re also excited to be the first University to offer Korean Studies major and minor fully online via Open Universities Australia. Our other successes included winning project funding to run free after school Korean language and culture  classes for high school students in Perth to any interested high school students in our region.

2022 was also very successful for the Centre, as we secured major research funding from the Academy of Korean Studies (Core Program), Australia Korea Foundation and the Korea Foundation. In 2023 we will welcome two postdoctoral fellows, one fully funded PhD student, several Honours students all whom will be focusing on Korea research. We will also shortly announce a call for EOI’s for the 2023 KRC Visiting Researcher program so the coming year looks to be busy and exciting. Don’t miss out on any of our events and opportunities by following us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

Curtin University also continues to forge strong links with new partner institutions in Korea, Curtin Global campuses and with our industry in educational partners engaged in enhancing Australia-Korea links.

Look out for some exciting announcements of our future activities, and we wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2023!

Dear friends and supporters of the Korea Research Centre,

As a very special year of celebrating the 60th Anniversary of Australia-ROK Diplomatic Relations draws to a close, it is a good time to reflect on the successes of the Korea Research Centre team over the past year.

Bringing Korea-Australia relations to a clearer focus gave us many wonderful opportunities to collaborate with new and existing partners throughout the year. President Moon Jae-in’s visit to Australia earlier this month and the signing of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership highlighted the importance of Korea to Australia relations, and the growing interest in and appeal of Korean popular culture also meant that our staff had a busy year of media and invited speaker engagements.

Collaborative research is what we do well, and since the launch of the Centre our team of KRC researchers have published more than 30 research outputs, including the launching of the new Korea Research Centre Paper Series in December 2021. Events-wise, our year began by organising the first KRC Research Collaboratory, which brought together scholars from around the world working on the cultural and social significance of nominalising and understanding Korean emotions. In fields such as history, as well as sociology and anthropology, scholars are now increasingly interested in explored the significance of emotional behaviours in shaping and motivating human action in the past and present. In Korea too, concepts such as han, jeong and heung are frequently used concepts, but less theorised as such, and this Collaboratory provided a timely forum to explore these ideas.

In February we also hosted a KRC Postgraduate Workshop, which was run fully online due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. The workshop sought to provide highly targeted support for postgraduates whose work focuses on Korea. Each student was paired with an expert in their field and provided with detailed feedback, and we had participants to join us from Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Spain, Germany and the UK.

In June we co-hosted the KRC and UWA Defence and Security Institute Dialogue that focused on ROK-Australia Defence and Security ties. This event featured both online public webinars on Korea-Australia relations and an in-person invitation only roundtable dialogue, and the policy recommendation reports arising from this event can be found here and here.

In 2022, supported by funding from the Australia Korea Foundation (DFAT), we will work on Korean language education policy advice for WA schools, and continue to run a regular series of online webinars. We will also continue to support independent, Early Career and other interested researchers whose work focuses on Korea through providing a collegial environment for joint research collaborations.

And finally, to round up a busy but successful year we were pleased to launch our new website, which will be regularly updated with resources for research, teaching and Korea engagement.

We wish you all a very successful and happy New Year 2022 of the Tiger!

The KRC Team