About the Professor

Hyung Il Pai

Ph.D., Harvard University
Associate Professor in East Asian Languages & Cultures and the History Department.
Office: Humanities and Social Sciences Building, 2222
Phone: (805) 893-2245
Email: 

Hyung Il Pai was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, but was educated in many different places, including Singapore, Malaysia and the United States. After graduating from Sogang University with a BA in history, she entered the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at Harvard University. Professor Pai has conducted research at the Seoul National Museum, participated in excavations by Seoul National University throughout the Korean peninsula and studied at East Asian archives at Tokyo University, the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library) and the International Center for Japanese Studies.

All her publications and teaching reflect the very inter-disciplinary nature of Professor Pai's work that continues to focus on how the politics of nationalism, colonialism and identity formation have affected the fields of archaeology, ethnography, and cultural heritage management in Korea and Japan. Professor Pai's current research is directed at contextualizing the ethnographic knowledge and comparative methodology pioneered by Japanese colonial anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians whose racial and civilization origins theories of Asian peoples are still critical to delineating the ancient cultures and ethnic peoples from Mongolia, China, Korea, and Taiwan.

At UCSB, she is the director of the Korean language program, overseeing the hiring of lecturers and curriculum development. Professor Pai is also the chair of the Korea division of the EAP program, whose system-wide office is on this campus. She has recently been voted Chair of the Committee on Korea Studies of the Association of Asian Studies (2002-2004).

As of April 2007, Professor Pai is a Visiting Research Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan.  She plans to return to Santa Barbara in the spring of 2008.

Selected Publications

• "Collecting "Japan's Antiquity" in Colonial Korea: The Tokyo Anthropological Society and the Cultural Comparative Perspective" in Moving Objects: Time, Space, and Context, 26th International Symposium on the Preservation of Cultural Property Series, National Reserach Institute of Cultural Properties Publication, Tokyo, 2004
• "The Creation of National Treasures and Monuments: The 1916 Japanese Laws on the Preservation of Korean Remains and Relics and their Colonial Legacies." Journal of Korean Studies 25(1), 2001.
• "Japanese Anthropology and the Discovery of 'Prehistoric Korea.'" Journal of East Asian Archaeology, 353-382, Inaugural Issue, Kwang-chih Chang Festschrift. E. J. Brill, Netherlands, 2000.
• Constructing "Korean" Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State Formation Theories. Harvard/Hallym Series, Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press (2000)
• "Nationalism and Preserving Korea's Buried Past: the Office of Cultural Properties and Archeological Heritage Management in South Korea." In Antiquity 73 (Sept.), 1999.
• "Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity." East Asia Monograph Series, University of California, Berkeley 1998.
• "Culture and National Identity," Chapter 24 (Translations) in Sourcebook of Korean Tradition Vol. II, ed. Peter H. Lee. Columbia University Press, 1996.
• "The Politics of Korea's Past: The Legacies of Japanese Colonial Archaeology in the Korean Peninsula." In Shih (East Asian History) 7. Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 1994.
• "The Nangnang Triangle in China, Japan and Korea." In Korean Culture 14(4), 1993.

Teaching

• Tourism in East Asian (East Asian 30)
• Korean Society and Culture (Korean 82; same course as History 82)
• Korean History Survey (Korean 182A-B; same course as History 182A-B)
• Korean Art and Archaeology (History 182E)
• Korean Literature Survey (Korean 113)
• Proseminar in Korean History (Korean 182P)
• Becoming " Korean": Current Perspectives on Race, Culture, and Identity (Freshman seminar)