Korean Studies Overseas

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to seek answers to three simple questions: What is Korean studies, who needs it, and who should pay for it? Such questions are increasingly important in Europe, where I work, though their pertinence to the American situation appears to be slightly blunted by vocal lobbying and the public force of the more than a million Korean - Americans. The questions derive from the virtually unanswerable: "What is academia, who needs it, and who should pay for it?" Such questions have less place in Korea and East Asia than elsewhere in the developing global capitalist system, because of a traditional respect for education, learning, and scholarship. Yet, even if they and their attendant concerns may seem distant, Korean grant-givers ignore them at their peril.