The ICAS Bulletin
Institute for Corean-American Studies, Inc.
Jacqueline Pak
ICAS Fellow
Dear Friend:
We are pleased to share with you that Jacqueline Pak has been named
ICAS Fellow.
Jacqueline Pak is historian of modern Korea and Asian America. Her
forthcoming book, An Ch'angho (1878-1938) and the Nationalist Origins of
Korean Democracy, is an intellectual biography of An Ch'angho, the chief
architect and strategist of the Korean independence movement, based on a
voluminous collection of his private papers for the first time.
Beginning as a dissertation at the University of London, her study
illumines the philosophical and political milieu which gave rise to An
Ch'angho's emergence as the founding father of the Republic of Korea who
drafted the first republican constitution, unified the Korean
Provisional Government, and waged the war of independence against the
Japanese colonialists. Her study is a systematic empirical effort to
delineate the manner in which the ideals and practice of democracy was
assimilated in the Korean nationalist movement and to rectify previous
misjudgment of An Ch'angho as a "gradualist-pacifist", "cultural
nationalist", or passive collaborator.
Her scrutiny of the private papers reveals that An Ch'angho was, most of
all, a pioneering constitutional democrat who pursued the goal of
sovereign freedom as a militarist revolutionary and strategist. In this
regard, the underlying assumptions concerning the ideological nature and
political dynamics of the Korean quest for independence and democracy
are critically reconfigured and reconceptualized, rejecting the earlier
divisive and binary Cold War paradigms or the accumulated contradictions
of colonialism. As a biography of leader and nation, it captures a
unique and indigenous form of nationalism expressed in a rare merger of
revolution and democracy in East Asia. Overcoming a storm of academic
controversy, her new findings confront and interrogate the earlier
conceptions of An Ch'angho as a "gradualist-pacifist" or "cultural
nationalist", the idée fixé which had not been seriously questioned
since the 1960s. (Reflecting the symbolic significance of his
transnational diasporic leadership including early Korean-Americans, his
statue will be unveiled in August 2001 in the city square of Riverside,
CA, next to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.)
As a fourth-generation Korean-American, she feels a special kinship with
her subject of study, An Ch'angho, with whom her great-grandfather, Pak
Youngjik, studied and lived together at the Hungsadan headquarters in
Los Angeles for more than fifteen years. Pak Youngjik was also an early
member of the revolutionary leadership-training society, Hungsadan
(Young Korean Academy), established by An Ch'angho in 1913 in San
Francisco, California. Eventually, Pak became one of Korea's earliest
Impressionist painters and a professor of Western painting at Seoul
National University.
She was born in Jinhae, Korea, where her father taught at the Korean
Naval Academy for over a decade and translated multi-volumes on naval
strategy. Educated in Seoul, she came to America as a teenager. Raised
in northern Virginia, she was the first Asian-American woman in the
Government and Foreign Affairs department at the University of Virginia,
where she received a B.A. in International Relations. While working at
the United Nations, Political and Security Council Affairs, she gained
an M.A. in Politics/Political Economy from New York University. She
earned another M.A. in Korean Studies from Harvard University where she
studied with Edward Wagner. Award-winning intellectual historian,
Martina Deuchler was her doctoral advisor at the University of London,
SOAS. As pioneers of Korean Studies in the West, Wagner and Deuchler are
protégées of John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reishchauer, the founders of
East Asian Studies at Harvard.
As a Korea Foundation Fellow in 1994, she conducted research at the
Independence Hall of Korea, where she was the first scholar to examine
the collections of private papers of So Chaep'il (1866 -1951) and An
Ch'angho. In 1995-1998, she was a Korea Foundation Scholar in London.
Following the footsteps of her peripatetic subject, she has lived and
worked in Washington, DC, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, London,
Wiesbaden, and Seoul. She has been engaged in research and policymaking
assignments for the United Nations, Harvard Business School, Library of
Congress, and Sejong Institute, among others. Since 1995, she has
presented her new discoveries on An Ch'angho at academic conferences in
Europe and North America. She also appeared in a number of radio and
television broadcasts as a bilingual scholar on the Korean nationalist
movement in America.
Jacqueline is Korea specialist at the Library of Congress. Recently, she
taught Korean history as a visiting professor and Henry Luce fellow at
UCLA. Currently, she is writing a multi-generational family memoir as an
odyssey between Korea and America.
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Sincerely,
Sang Joo Kim
Sr Fellow & Executive Vice President
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