Editorial Note

Abstract

The Journal of Korean Studies (JKS) is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes in all disciplines on a broad range of topics concerning Korea. One of the main contributions of JKS is to introduce new scholarship that brings diverse themes, theories, geographies, temporalities, and cultures to study Korea and the world. Authors of JKS grapple with the parameters of the field and the meaning of Korea. Although the aim is not to formulate a fixed meaning, what is clear is that scholars are continuously expanding epistemological boundaries and breaking new ground in Korean studies. Drawing on multiple disciplinary trajectories, the spring 2023 issue comprises seven articles and four book reviews. The articles in this issue explore the dynamics of broad political, social, and cultural issues—rinderpest and cross-border control, Romanticism and nationalism, national defense and technology, the developmental state and utilitarian ideology, class system and state-building, veganism and transnational mobility, and multiculturalism and cultural citizenship. These articles offer a crucial lens on the complex intersections of state, society, and culture. The first two articles, by Joseph Seeley and Kevin M. Smith, cover colonial Korea. Seeley introduces an understudied topic related to infectious disease between 1910 and the 1930s that is very relevant to the present-day issue. Using rinderpest as a lens, this article examines how the Japanese Government-General of Korea attempted to control viral “invasions” from the Sino-Korean border in the northern peninsula. Seeley shows how the colonial government implemented the modern veterinary regime and Koreans resisted rinderpest outbreaks. This article offers an opportunity to learn from history how viral diseases were dealt with in the early twentieth century, which resonates with today’s COVID-19 in the twenty-first century. Shifting to the analysis of colonial literature, Im Hwa’s Hyŏnhaet’an, Smith examines the maritime poetry that discusses the strait that