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.
2025 Competition Deadline: January 15, 2025
Eligibility: Korean Studies Books published in 2023 and 2024
Who Can Submit: Publishers or Authors
How to Submit: Send a digital version of the book (if available) by email to anjinsoo@berkeley.edu and/or a physical copy to the following address for consideration:
Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies
c/o Jinsoo An
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 2025, followed by an award ceremony in the spring of 2026 featuring a special lecture by the awardee(s)’s and an invited scholar respondent’s presentation at the Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley.
Inquiries may be directed to: anjinsoo@berkeley.edu
Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Choson Diplomacy with Ming China
Columbia University Press, 2023
Professor Sixiang Wang (University of California, Los Angeles)
For more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with neighboring Ming China, which dwarfed it in size, population, and power. This remarkably long period of sustained peace was not an inevitable consequence of Chinese cultural and political ascendancy. In this book, Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Chosŏn political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order.
Boundless Winds of Empire is a cultural history of diplomacy that traces Chosŏn’s rhetorical and ritual engagement with China. Chosŏn drew on classical Chinese paradigms of statecraft, political legitimacy, and cultural achievement. It also paid regular tribute to the Ming court, where its envoys composed paeans to Ming imperial glory. Wang argues these acts were not straightforward affirmations of Ming domination; instead, they concealed a subtle and sophisticated strategy of diplomatic and cultural negotiation. He shows how Korea’s rulers and diplomats inserted Chosŏn into the Ming Empire’s legitimating strategies and established Korea as a stakeholder in a shared imperial tradition. Boundless Winds of Empire recasts a critical period of Sino-Korean relations through the Korean perspective, emphasizing Korean agency in the making of East Asian international relations.
Sixiang Wang is assistant professor of Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.
| 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.