The Korea Society

November 19, 2024 - The Korea Society is pleased to announce that the eighth annual Sherman Family Korea Emerging Scholar Lecture Awardee is Dr. David Krolikoski, assistant professor at the University of Hawai’i. In his lecture Dr. Krolikoski examines The Silence of Love (Nim ŭi ch’immuk, 1926), the acclaimed collection of eighty-eight poems by Han Yong-un (1879-1944), a Buddhist monk and public intellectual. Although the book is commonly celebrated as a metaphor for colonial subjugation, Dr. Krolikoski complicates this established reading to argue that its artistic significance lies in Han’s paradigm-shifting use of colonial poetry as a medium of communal expression during a time of national crisis. The lecture explores how Han uses fiction and symbols to collapse the boundary between private and public address, transmuting the individual voice of his poetic speaker into a platform for a community. Dr. Krolikoski also contextualizes The Silence of Love within the history of the translation of foreign poetic