About
I study records that do not agree with themselves.
I am a historian of late Chosŏn political institutions, administrative knowledge, and state violence. I am especially interested in the distance between an event and the record eventually made to explain it: what officials knew at a particular moment, how that knowledge moved through the bureaucracy, and how later compilers transformed uncertainty into historical certainty.
My current research centers on the Catholic cases of 1795 and 1801. These cases are often narrated through identities and outcomes that became clear only later. I instead ask what contemporaries could actually have known, what legal categories made action possible, and how retrospective narratives reorganized the surviving evidence.
That approach requires treating disagreement between records not as a problem to be smoothed away, but as evidence of how historical knowledge was produced.
Why Late Chosŏn?
The archive becomes most revealing at the point where later certainty has not yet formed.
I am drawn to late Chosŏn not as a static “traditional society,” but as a densely documented administrative state confronting political conflict, religious heterodoxy, border anxiety, rumor, and institutional uncertainty. Its records preserve decisions, but they also preserve hesitation: officials debating jurisdiction, revising descriptions, transmitting incomplete reports, and acting before the meaning of an event had become settled.
That uncertainty is historically valuable. It allows us to recover not only what happened, but the institutional process through which an event became legible to the state.
From Institutions to Archives
I came to historical research through political science, legal reasoning, translation, and years of working with administrative documents. That route taught me to attend closely to procedure: who possessed jurisdiction, what a document was written to accomplish, which facts were legally actionable, and how later summaries can erase the uncertainty visible in an original record.
When I began working extensively with the Chosŏn wangjo sillok and Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi, I encountered many of the same interpretive problems in a different institutional world. A record was never simply a container of facts. It was an intervention produced by a particular office, genre, moment, and political purpose.
My historical method grew from learning to ask what a document was doing before asking whether its account was true.
- 01Political institutions
- 02Legal and administrative records
- 03Translation and close reading
- 04Chosŏn archival reconstruction
What I Ask of a Record
Four working rules shape how I reconstruct people, institutions, and events from the archive.
- 01
Do not give historical actors knowledge they did not yet possess
Later sources often identify people, motives, and consequences that were uncertain to contemporaries. Historical reconstruction must preserve that uncertainty rather than reading the ending backward into the beginning.
- 02
Treat textual differences as evidence
Omission, interpolation, name corruption, compiler gloss, and altered legal language are not merely imperfections in transmission. They reveal how historical knowledge was reorganized.
- 03
Preserve institutional categories before collapsing them into narrative
A persecution, purge, border offense, treason investigation, and associational prosecution may overlap in memory while remaining legally and administratively distinct. Those distinctions matter.
- 04
Reconstruct people across record systems
Individuals become stock characters when scholarship inherits them from a single narrative tradition. Administrative records, genealogies, examination registers, legal dossiers, and missionary accounts can recover lives that the received story has simplified.
Languages of the Archive
My research moves between Classical Chinese administrative texts, modern Korean scholarship, English-language historiography, genealogical records, and European missionary materials. Working across these forms requires more than translation at the sentence level. Each carries its own conventions of naming, chronology, genre, institutional vocabulary, and evidentiary authority.
I use digital corpus construction and command-line search to locate textual patterns, but interpretation remains grounded in close reading and comparison of complete documentary contexts. Search can reveal that a phrase appears; it cannot by itself explain what the phrase was doing in a particular record.
- Court records
- Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi · Chosŏn wangjo sillok · Ilsŏngnok · Naegak illyŏk
- Legal and administrative records
- Ch’uan kŭp kugan · Administrative circulars · Memorials
- Genealogical records
- Chokpo · Marriage connections · Examination registers
- Transnational records
- Missionary correspondence · Later French histories · Korean narrative traditions
Teaching Close Reading
What does the text actually establish?
Teaching has made me more attentive to the distance between seeing evidence and making an argument from it. Whether I am teaching rhetorical analysis, formal logic, or historical interpretation, I return to the same questions: What does the text actually establish? Which inference is justified? What assumptions have entered between observation and conclusion?
Those questions also govern my archival work. Teaching and research are not separate activities for me; both involve helping an argument become more precise than the story that first produced it.
Elsewhere
Outside the archive, I play piano, support Busan I'Park with historically vindicated pessimism, and share my home with Cookie, an eight-year-old Maltipoo known ceremonially as the Duke of Duckworth.