Research Interests
Late Chosŏn political history · Archival method · State violence · Factional politics · Administrative knowledge
Education
- Major GPA: 3.9; Political Science Departmental Honors; Dean’s Honor Roll; Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society.
- Senior thesis on Zainichi Korean identity, supervised by Prof. Robert Uriu.
- Acquired advanced Classical Chinese primary-source reading proficiency through sustained work in the Chosŏn wangjo sillok and Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi.
Research and Manuscripts
Manuscripts in Preparation
- Argues that the Zhou Wenmo-centered framing of the Ŭlmyo Incident is a post-1801 Pyŏkp’a construction contradicted by the contemporaneous administrative record.
- Evidentiary core: Ch’ae Chegong’s 7/8 차자 using 假稱華人, treating Zhou as unverified Catholic rumor; the excision of 非出於聖旨 乃自下擅行 from the Sillok’s rendering of Yi Anmuk’s memorial, preserved in the Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi; the 三漢 compiler gloss present in the Sillok but absent from the unglossed Ilgi record; and the total excision of 정조 19년 7월 8일 from 권43 of the 정조실록 despite continuous pagination.
- Corroborating findings include name corruptions in the Hansŏngbu circular (崔定吉 / 池洪), inconsistent with a targeted operation against a known foreign priest, and the 假稱掩眞有 boilerplate of the anti-Ch’ae memorial campaign, first attested only in September 1801.
- Draws on direct Classical Chinese analysis of the Chosŏn wangjo sillok, Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi, Ilsŏngnok, and Naegak illyŏk, cross-verified across multiple administrative corpora.
- Argues that Han Yŏngik’s role as the denouncer of Zhou Wenmo is first attested only in Tasan’s 自撰墓誌銘 and enters modern scholarship through a transmission chain—Tasan to Daveluy to Dallet—rather than through any contemporaneous witness.
- Establishes by bilateral chokpo verification that the woman Tasan designates 妹 was Han Tŏkkŏm’s daughter (gen. 25), one full generation senior to Han Yŏngik (gen. 26), rendering the sister narrative genealogically impossible; documents instead a 5-ch’on maternal kinship between Han and Yi Sŏk running through Han Chonghae, Han Tŏksu, Yi Puman, and Yi Sŏk.
- Reconstructs Han from the record as an age-29 chinsa of the Ch’ŏngju Han lineage, born in 1767, with a wife trilaterally attested as a Hansan Yi; a Naegak illyŏk entry of 1799/12/15 places him on the routine examination circuit four years after the incident, refuting Dallet’s account of his death in disgrace.
- Establishes that no pre-Tasan witness assigns Han the denouncer’s role: Gouvea’s 1797 Latin letter leaves both denouncer and warner anonymous and designates each praefectus militaris, incompatible with Han’s civil chinsa status; the 백서 names Han only in the Hong Nangmin notice, and Hwang Sayŏng’s failure to vilify him serves as positive evidence of non-identity.
Research Project in Development
- Recovers a tripartite prosecutorial structure from direct Classical Chinese analysis of the 추안급국안 corpus, treating charge language as legally specific—辛酉士禍, 犯越, 謀逆大逆不道—rather than as interchangeable persecution vocabulary.
- Demonstrates sequential trigger logic across all three tracks: Track 1’s associational dragnet produces Zhou Wenmo’s juridical appearance, which retroactively constitutes the sheltering network as criminally actionable under a 1686 border-security statute; Track 2’s investigation produces the evidentiary conditions for the 謀逆 threshold; Hwang Sayŏng’s 尺帛凶書 collapses the remaining categorical distinctions.
- Situates the martyrological tradition of 辛酉邪獄 within the institutional sequence it cannot explain: the mass commoner executions the tradition documents become historically intelligible only as the downstream consequence of three legally distinct prosecutorial tracks that the received frame collapses into one.
Undergraduate Research
- Applies critical race theory to a non-Western racial formation in which “race” carries no legal definition, arguing that the absence of statutory racial categories in the Japanese constitutional framework obscures rather than eliminates structural discrimination against Zainichi Koreans.
- Traces discrimination across education, employment, housing, and political participation as institutionally reproduced rather than individually perpetuated, situating Zainichi marginalization within the colonial legal architecture that produced it.
- Examines the Chongryon–Mindan organizational split as a case study in how Cold War ideological pressures fragmented Zainichi political identity, foreclosing coalitional strategies for rights advocacy.
Teaching and Instruction
- Design and deliver individualized and group instruction in the SAT, ACT, LSAT, critical reading, rhetorical analysis, and academic writing.
- Develop proprietary curricula integrating close reading, formal logic, rhetorical analysis, and evidence-based argumentation.
- Track longitudinal student performance and adapt instruction in response to diagnostic data and recurring error patterns.
- Provided feedback on academic papers, graduate school applications, professional materials, and research writing across disciplines.
- Addressed structural gaps in student argumentation and helped multilingual writers navigate academic register.
- Developed instructional material covering immigration, human rights, and international law for U.S. Foreign Policy.
- Graded assignments for Law and Society with reference to constitutional-law frameworks and held daily office hours.
Additional Professional Experience
- Drafted memoranda adopted as city policy following council vote and synthesized public-opinion data to inform policy recommendations.
- Attended city council sessions and prepared detailed briefing memoranda for the Vice Mayor’s office.
Languages and Digital Methods
- Korean (native); English (native); Classical Chinese (advanced primary-source reading proficiency focused on Chosŏn administrative records); Spanish (reading proficiency).
- Classical Chinese corpus construction; command-line text search; retrieval-assisted source comparison; HTML; CSS; JavaScript; React; Node.js; Python; R.