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2026 marks eighty years since the trusteeship struggle and the Autumn Harvest Uprising, two events that set the trajectory for the establishment of the South Korean state in 1948. More broadly speaking, a little over a century has passed since the Peace Preservation Law under Japanese colonial rule (1925), eight decades since the liberation period that ended in division, war, and anti-communist dictatorship (1945–50), and almost four decades since the June Democratic Struggle (1987) paved the way for the democratization of South Korea. However, as political scientist Choi Jang-jip emphasized in the early 1990s, the three entangled legacies of colonialism, civil war, and dictatorship have left fundamental cleavages in South Korean debates over history and (collective) memory.
Collective memory has been described by scholars as socially constructed, and closely related to myth and hegemony. In Cold War South Korea, victim’s perspectives have long been suppressed against statist claims over historical legitimacy. Only in the 1990s did a bottom-up historical fact-finding process gradually lead to a process of “unforgetting.” Although a state-led Truth and Reconciliation Commission was eventually established in 2005, this triggered a backlash from the former ruling elite. South Korea since has been described as a society in a “psycho-historical fragmentation” (Kim Mikyoung) undergoing “history wars” (Kim Chŏng-in).
To date, taboos, myth, and collective forgetting remain in South Korean commemorative culture. This workshop seeks to examine the history museum in South Korea (and beyond) as a manifestation of collective memory, and a space in which historiographic research, memory making, and political agendas are entangled. A special focus is laid on topics related to modern nationalism, colonialism, and the Cold War.
Program:
Introductory Session (09:00–09:30)
(1) Patrick Vierthaler: Coming to Terms with the Past, Transitional Justice, History Wars, and the History Museum: Aims and Perspectives of this Workshop
Session 1: The Pre-Modern and Colonial Era and its Legacy (09:45–12:00)
(2) Tatsuya Maisawa (Kobe University): The Changing Memory Landscape of Hwangtohyeon: Commemorating the Donghak Peasant War in South Korea
(3) María del Pilar Álvarez (Universidad del Salvador): In Their Names: Historical Memory and Feminism in Museums and Art Exhibitions of “Comfort Women” in South Korea
(4) Yuko Takahashi (Osaka Metropolitan University: How to approach to colonial entanglement through museum exhibitions: the case of Korean atomic-bomb victims
(5) Yuka Yamaguchi (Kyushu University): Histories and Practices of Zainichi Korean Museums: Making Diversity Visible in Japanese Society
Lunch Break (12:00–13:30)
Session 2: Global and Bilateral Perspectives (13:30–15:30)
(6) Arya Prasad (Jawaharlal Nehru University): History Museums and the International Gaze: The Politics of Remodelling Korean Museum Narratives for Global Audiences
(7) Jeremiah Estela Magoncia (Ateneo de Manila University): From Museum to Youtube: Digital “Unforgetting” in Korean History
(8) Rochelle D. Leonor (University of the Philippines Diliman): Who Says What? Narratives of Korean War Memorials in the Republic of Korea and the Philippines
(9) Mikyoung Kim (Gyeongsang National University): Strategic Forgetting and Selective Remembering: Politics of 2025 Commemoration in Korea-Japan Relations
Session 3: Anti-Communism and Democracy (15:45–18:00)
(10) Patrick Vierthaler (Kyoto University): Exhibiting the Liberation Period: Conflicting Memories of the Collaborator Issue and Division in South Korean History Museums
(11) Dominique Hoogteijling (Yonsei University): Park Chung-Hee’s Contested Commemoration: The Operationalisation of Humanising Narratives in the Park Chung-Hee Presidential Museum
(12) Bálint Jurászik (Kodolányi János University, Hybrid): Remembering Gwangju: Museums, Memorial Sites, and the Politics of Memory in South Korea [moved to slot no. 1]
(13) Yoon Walker (SOAS, University of London, Hybrid): From a “Chamber of Silence” to a “Square of Democracy”: The Spatial Transformation of Namyeong-dong Anti-Communist Investigation Centre”
