AHA Session 145
Friday, January 9, 2026: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Spire Parlor (Palmer House Hilton, Sixth Floor)
Chair:
Stella Yingzi Xu, Roanoke College
Papers:
Session Abstract
Historical objectivity was perhaps nothing more than “that noble dream.” Nowhere is this more true than in the case in Korea, where the writing of history has been constantly dogged by questions of politicization. Native traditions of historiography, political in and of themselves, were appropriated as fuel for nation building, while faux-neutral positivism arrived in Korea in the twentieth century imbricated in imperial ideologies. Later, questions of decolonization, the division of the peninsula, and the fierce polarization of left and right similarly locked history writing into politics’ inevitable gravitational pull. This panel interrogates the intersection of politics and historiography in Korea, demonstrating how politics has defined historiographic paradigms and obscured alternative interpretations of the past from ancient times to the present day. Each paper historicizes a different historiographic bone of contention: nation-building orientated discourse on antiquity; the question of Korea’s imperial tradition; the framing of colonial collaborators; and the origins of nationalistic history writing on the left and right. Jack Davey historicizes the modern discussion of the Korean Iron Age (ca. 300 BCE to 300 CE), seemingly a function of nation-building and nationalism, by locating it within a larger trajectory of premodern and modern historical interpretations of the Korean past. Graeme R. Reynolds shows that recent understandings of Koryŏ (918–1392) as an empire hinge on modern interpretations of particular ideologically motivated practices of history writing by the Chosŏn court (1392–1910) when compiling Koryŏ history. Patrick Vierthaler examines the question of colonial-era collaborators, making a comparative historical and historiographic argument to show that the history of collaboration in Korea was not that different from other nations, but what diverged was how the history was written. Sungik Yang unpacks the origins of nationalist historiography in right-wing history writing, revealing the recent provenance of right-wing arguments that nationalist historiography is the creation of the left. Collectively, these papers seek to expand the horizon of modern historiography in Korea.
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