The Center for Korean Studies (CKS) at UC Berkeley is pleased to announce the establishment of the Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies. Inaugurated in 2022 to honor the late Professor Hong Yung Lee, the Award acknowledges books (and authors) that make significant contributions to the field of Korean Studies. The competition is flexible in regards to academic discipline, and encompasses not only the conventional areas of Korean Studies (i.e., humanities, arts and media, and social sciences) but also Korean Studies texts that engage the Korean diaspora and/or comparative approaches. $10,000 will be awarded each year to the author(s) whose nonfiction English-language academic monograph demonstrates outstanding scholarly merit, research prowess, and methodological innovation. This book award was launched with the generous support of Whakyung Choi Lee.
2026 Competition Deadline: January 15, 2026
Eligibility: Korean Studies Books published in 2024 and 2025
Who Can Submit: Publishers or Authors
How to Submit: Send a digital version of the book (if available) by email to stevenlee@berkeley.edu and/or a physical copy to the following address for consideration:
Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies
c/o Steven Lee
Center for Korean Studies
Banway Building
2111 Bancroft Way, Suite 549L
Berkeley, CA 94720
Digital submissions are preferred. If submitting only a physical copy, please send an accompanying email to cks@berkeley.edu with the name of the author and title of the book.
Books submitted for the prior year competition that did not win and whose publication dates fall within the specified range of eligibility will be automatically reconsidered.
Review Process: All submissions will undergo a preliminary review by the Koreanist faculty at UC Berkeley. Subsequently, the Center for Korean Studies will form an independent external review committee composed of representatives from the field of Korean Studies outside UC Berkeley to review and assess the finalists’ books and select the winner.
The result will be announced in the fall of 2026, followed by an award ceremony in the spring of 2027 featuring a special lecture by the awardee(s) and an invited scholar respondent’s presentation at the Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley.
Inquiries may be directed to: stevenlee@berkeley.edu
Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War
Cornell University Press, 2023
Professor Suzy Kim (Rutgers University)
In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim explores the transnational connections between North Korean women and the global women's movement. Asian women, especially communists, are often depicted as victims of a patriarchal state. Kim challenges this view through extensive archival research, revealing that North Korean women asserted themselves from the late 1940s to 1975, before the Korean War began and up to the UN's International Women's Year.
Kim centers on North Korea and the "East" to present a new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union (KDWU), part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), argued that family and domestic issues should be central to both national and international debates. They highlighted the connections between race, nationality, sex, and class in systems of exploitation. Their intersectional program proclaimed "no peace without justice," "the personal is the political," and "women's rights are human rights," long before Western activists adopted these ideas. Among Women across Worlds uncovers movements and ideas foundational to today's era.
Suzy Kim is Professor of Korean History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950.
| 2025 |
Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War |
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| 2024 |
Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Choson Diplomacy with Ming China |
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| 2023 |
Language and Truth in North Korea |
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| 2022 |
Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday |
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The late Prof. Hong Yung Lee (1939-2017) taught political science at Yale University and UC Berkeley. As Chair of the Center for Korean Studies in the formative years from the 1990s into the 2000s, he had a profound impact on the development of Korean Studies at UC Berkeley. He was also the first tenured Korean faculty member in the social sciences hired by the university. A scholar of comparative studies of East Asian politics and culture, Prof. Lee wrote numerous landmark articles about Korea in the English, Korean, and Chinese languages in addition to ground-breaking monographs about Chinese politics such as The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China. A more detailed remembrance of Prof. Lee's life and work can be found here.