Studying Korean Film at Cambridge
As Korean studies develops at Cambridge, we are looking to attract M Phil and PhD candidates interested in pursuing research in Korean film. Korean film has been a part of artistic and intellectual life around Cambridge for some years. The Arts Picturehouse has been an established venue for Korean feature films since the New Korean Cinema began to attract UK audiences from around 2001. Members of the Department of East Asian Studies have organized screenings of Korean films within the Faculty and also at various colleges such as Darwin and Trinity.
Since 2006 Korean film has been part of the undergraduate course Cinema East: An Introduction to the Film Traditions of East Asia. Directors studied
include Shin Sang-ok, Im Kwon-taek, Yi Chang-dong and Hong Sang-soo. M Phil students in the East Asian Studies are free to pursue research in Korean film for the dissertation project. (One recent graduate researched representations of the zainichi/resident Korean community in Japan in both Korean and Japanese film.)
In 2008 the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) granted Cambridge the status of Hub-Library for the development of Korean film studies in the UK. We received a generous donation of both books (English and Korean) and DVDs. These have considerably supplemented our basic collections of films on DVD and printed material. We also have links with the Korean Film Archive (KOFA). KOFA too has provided important material for our library. When Cambridge hosted the 2008 conference of the British Association of Korean Studies, researchers from KOFA and the US participated in the film studies panels.
If you would like to learn more about graduate-level study of Korean film at Cambridge, please contact Mark Morris: mrm1000@cam.ac.uk.
Dr. John Swenson-Wright with actor Lee Byung-hun at the 2008 London Korean Film Festival
