Riding the Hallyu

Since the mid 1990s, South Korean culture has exploded on the global stage, from K-beauty to the highly choreographed musical performances of K-pop groups such as Blackpink and BTS to Oscar-winning films (think Bong Joon Ho’s white-knuckle satire Parasite). These days, shows like the South Korean dystopian thriller series Squid Game – which follows fictional contestants as they attempt to save themselves from economic ruin by competing in kids’ games with deadly consequences – are household names everywhere.

But UC Irvine didn’t hop on this Korean Wave, or hallyu, so much as it leaned into its existing position as a leader in Korean studies and critical theory. Since its inception almost a decade ago, the campus’s Center for Critical Korean Studies has become one of the largest such entities in the United States, earning an international reputation as an interdisciplinary powerhouse that attracts academics, guests and funding from around the world. Though its core focus is producing Korea-specific research and, naturally, critical theory, CCKS also promotes undergraduate learning and has become a community hub not just for the university’s Korean community but for anyone with an interest in Korean culture.

Building a Foundation

Korean studies had become a strength for us at UCI, but it was very dispersed,” says English professor and CCKS director Joseph Jeon, who took over in 2019 from founding director Kyung Hyun Kim, professor and chair in East Asian studies. “We had Korean studies faculty scattered throughout the university, primarily in the School of Humanities but also in social sciences.”

The impetus for an official center arrived in 2016. The Academy of Korean Studies, a quasi-governmental South Korean organization, awarded UC Irvine a five-year seed grant of 1 billion won – about $850,000 at the time. The goal was to create a hub for academics, fundraising and programming related to Korean art, modern history, film, literature and beyond. Despite its physical home inside the undulating Humanities Gateway building, CCKS is now a designated Campus Center (an organized interdepartmental research program that’s not officially an Organized Research Unit or a Special Research Program). That is to say that its purview is wide, extending beyond the humanities to include unexpected subjects like law and the environment.

The foundation of all this, of course, is Korean studies. CCKS supports undergraduate learning about Korean culture and history through coursework. “Sometimes it’s pretty traditional Korean studies, like a Korean film class,” says Jeon, whose work focuses on Korean cinema and whose most recent book, Bong Joon Ho, focuses on the acclaimed director of the Academy Award-winning 2019 film Parasite. Jeon notes that Korean-language courses have also become popular, with about 450 students enrolling annually. But because much of what CCKS does is interdisciplinary, a class on environmental issues might bring together historians with literature and film representations of the topic.

The center now has seven core faculty members and 10 affiliated faculty, who teach a broad range of courses on Korean art, history, literature, music, media and film. And there is high demand: Roughly 500 students take these Korean content courses every year.

CCKS supports research at the graduate and postgrad levels too. Through grants and fellowship programs, it trains leading Ph.D. students and postdocs working in critical Korean studies and invites full-time, Ph.D.-holding scholars from elsewhere to share their research via the center’s Visiting Scholar Fellowships. They come from all over the world (though they visit most often from South Korea), and CCKS even houses a few.

Funding the Work

At UC Irvine, CCKS has become an important source of funding for faculty. For one, it provides research grants for cutting-edge books, monographs and essays. One example, the prize-winning book Making Peace With Nature, by anthropology professor Eleana Kim, explores how rare species like Asiatic black bears and black-faced spoonbills have flourished in the absence of civilians around the Demilitarized Zone between North Korea and South Korea. Kim is an affiliated faculty member at CCKS.

Her colleague Sung Eun “Summer” Kim is a professor of law. Although her primary research and teaching interests are in corporate law, she also directs the Korea Law Center at UC Irvine’s School of Law. CCKS has funded Korea-related projects there, including through a recent faculty research grant. It will support the Korea Law Center’s Korean Lawyers in America Project, a longitudinal study that aims to combine survey data with interviews to trace the career trajectories of legal professionals of Korean descent who received their legal education or license to practice law in the U.S.

CCKS funding has been critical to their work. “Our research team announced the project at the International Association of Korean Lawyers meeting in Seoul, South Korea, this September,” Summer Kim says. “We are very grateful to the CCKS and for the vibrant intellectual environment they have created here at UCI for Korea-interested scholars.”

Engaging the Community

Every month, CCKS coordinates multiple events. The schedule has included things like a workshop for high school teachers, done in partnership with the South Korean consulate in Los Angeles, and a pop-up event after a Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Han Kang (author of the shocking but much lauded novel The Vegetarian), who had remotely participated in a CCKS event less than a year prior.

“We’re one of the most active centers on campus in terms of our programming and events,” Jeon says.

CCKS hosts bigger conferences at least every other year – often more frequently. Those draw big names from all over, even outside the academic sphere. Several years ago, it hosted the first Afro-Korean Hip-Hop Festival. The performers, who included Tiger JK, Yoon Mi-rae, Bizzy and Kurtis Blow, spanned eras and continents. Says Jeon, “We had some very famous, kind of old-school Korean rappers come and give a performance.”

Sometimes, events feature more local musicians, like the beloved campus group Hansori. It performs traditional Korean folk percussion in styles known as pungmul and samulnori. “It’s a pretty spectacular form of performance,” Jeon says. CCKS has occasionally provided funding to the drummers as well.

In 2024, more than 2,200 students (both undergraduate and graduate) – roughly 6 percent of UC Irvine’s student population – were of Korean heritage. And since 1992, more than 16,000 matriculating Anteaters self-identified as Korean. Currently, the UC Irvine Alumni Association’s Korean American chapter has almost 300 members, and its chapter in Seoul has nearly 500.

“I continue to be surprised by how interested students and community members are in our events,” Jeon says. “We have people who have no affiliation with the university but just live nearby come to all our events. That’s really wonderful to see.”

Indeed, nearly 30 percent of self-identified Korean Americans in the U.S. reside in California, according to the Pew Research Center, with Orange and Los Angeles counties being national hotspots.

In It for the Long Run

Jeon has also been wowed by both the quantity and quality of CCKS’s research output. “Our faculty has been super productive in terms of books and articles,” he says. “We always say we’re going to publish this many books or this many articles or have this many events, and we’re always way over.”

CCKS’s success has been clear. In 2021, it was awarded two large, prestigious grants, one from a South Korean nonprofit called the Korea Foundation and another from that nation’s Academy of Korean Studies. Combined, they provided more than $1 million. The center has also received a significant amount in private donations.

“I’m always amazed when people commit those kinds of resources to something that is not for personal gain,” Jeon says. “It’s purely out of a belief in what we do.”

Even so, it’s time to start looking toward the future, he says. “We have received a good deal of support, and I’m very, very grateful for that. The center couldn’t function without that support,” Jeon says. “But on the other hand, we’d really like to endow the center in the near future. That’s the real thing that keeps something around in perpetuity.”