Bridging Cultures: Scottish Literature in Korean

IASSL Webinar, Monday 8 September 2025, 13:00 BST / 21:00 KST

• ZOOM (Meeting ID: 856 9732 4885; Passcode: 385599)

Programme:

Meehyun Chung and L. M. Ratnapalan, ‘Lilias Horton Underwood’s Korean translations of Robert Louis Stevenson’

In 1921, Lilias Horton Underwood (1851–1921) published the earliest known Korean translation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She also translated Stevenson’s short story ‘The Bottle Imp’. Lilias was the wife of Horace Grant Underwood (1859–1916), an Anglo-American Presbyterian missionary and one of the founders of Yonsei University. The Underwoods were educators who believed in spreading the gospel through the printed word. Stevenson’s fiction, particularly Jekyll and Hyde, may seem like an unusual choice for missionary work given its dark and violent themes, but many missionaries at the time saw the story as reflecting Christian ideas about morality and redemption. In this presentation, we examine how Lilias Underwood translated Stevenson’s complex and symbolic language, the role her Korean assistant Tae-won Park (박태원) may have played in the process, and what these translations reveal about the global reception of Stevenson.

Paul Tonks and John M. Frankl, ‘Modern Korean Engagements with Scottish Writers: Exploring the Literary and Intellectual History of Korean-Scottish Relations’

The literary and intellectual relationships between Scotland and Korea have developed considerably in recent years. In 2019, for example, the Scottish Centre for Korean Studies was established at the University of Edinburgh. Many Scots are interested in Korean culture, both academics and the general public. Engagements between Scottish and Korean writers extend back into the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, however, during Korea’s ‘opening’ to Western nations during the ‘Gaehwa’ period. Scottish Enlightenment political economy and conjectural history/stadial theory were of major interest to Koreans in a time of huge transformations in East Asia. Christianity also made a significant impact due to the influence of missionaries, especially on education. Our paper connects these trends by examining the impact of Scottish writers in Korea from the late Chosun era, through the colonial period, and down to the present.

Chair:

Hyungji Park is Professor of English literature in the Department of English Language and Literature at Yonsei University. She is the co-author of Imperialism and Masculinity: Gender Formation in Nineteenth Century Britain, and has published recently in Wasafiri, Victorian Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and numerous other journals. She has held multiple senior administrative positions at Yonsei University, including serving as a founding member of Underwood International College (UIC) from 2004 and as UIC’s Dean from 2012 to 2016. Her primary fields of research and teaching include Victorian literature, Korean popular culture, Asian American literature, and contemporary fiction, with a focus on post-colonial and gender issues. Her recent research is clustered around methodological approaches of “locatedness” (i.e., doing English in Asia).

Speakers:

Meehyun Chung is Professor of Systematic Theology in the United Graduate School of Theology at Yonsei University, a Reverend of the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea (PROK), and Dean of the university Chaplaincy. She is also the Director of Yonsei’s Centre for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation and the moderator of the Commission for Ecumenical Education and Formation (EEF) of the World Council of Churches. She has published numerous books and articles on Reformed Theology with gender awareness and ecotheology. In 2006 she was awarded the Karl-Barth prize of the Union of Protestant Churches within the EKD (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland) for her doctoral thesis on Karl Barth, Josef Lukl Hromadka and Korea and also for her other research. She received the Marga Bührig Award in 2013 and was named one of ten key Reformed theologians by the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) in 2017. 

L. Michael Ratnapalan is Professor of History at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. He specializes in modern British history with a focus on the history of empire, religion, and missions. He is the author of Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). His research has appeared in a wide range of historical and literary journals including Scottish Literary Review, Religion and Literature, Historical Journal, Journal of Pacific History, Journal of Religious History,and Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. He is under contract to write a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson for Oxford University Press.

John M. Frankl is Professor of Korean and Comparative Literature at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. He specializes in modern Korean literature and has worked extensively on representations of ‘the foreign’ in Korean literature, culminating in a Korean-language monograph on the subject in 2008. His primary specialization over the last decade has been on the fiction and essays of the Japanese Colonial Period (1910-1945), with particular emphasis on the essays of Yi Sang (1910-1937). He has completed several annotated translations of and academic articles on these essays and is currently working on a complete annotated translation of and commentary on all of Yi Sang’s essays, critical works, and personal correspondence. 

Paul Tonks is Professor of History at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. His research has focused chiefly on the intellectual and cultural histories of the British Empire and Commonwealth, with particular attention to the place of Scotland and Scottish thought in the global intellectual history of colonial and postcolonial relations. Recently he has worked chiefly on Anglo-American engagements with East and South Asia in the early modern and modern eras. His current research examines the multifaceted impact and legacy of Christian missions in Korea. He serves as an International Advisor to the The Scottish Historical Review Trust and on the Editorial Board of The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies. He has previously served also on the Executive Committee of the Korea Britain Society and as a Director of External Relations at the Korean Society of British History.