Professional and Academic Background

I should provide a little background on myself first. I was born in Nürnberg, Germany, but my hometown has always been Dayton, Ohio, where I lived from the age of two. My mother is Korean and my father African-American. I attended Phillips Andover Academy before going on to Brown University and graduating in 1994. After spending two years in Korea, I'm now a graduate student at The University of California at Berkeley in Ethnic Studies.

I'll try to define myself in terms of intellectual "pursuits." As an undergraduate, I double majored in American History and American Civilization. I was interested in the colonial period, especially in Puritan theology and the Revolution, from Cotton Mather to Benjamin Rush. During my first year in Korea, I wasted a lot of time and money, but I had a lot of experiences that one can't really define in concrete terms, and these were valuable to my education about not only the country, but myself as well. It was during my second year in Korea that I began to get more serious about my Korean language study, and I began doing scholarly reading again on my own. From my time spent teaching in Korean middle school, my research interests have grown to involve education, its use as a means of perpetuting ideologies of nation and culture, their roles in the construction of Korean national identity. An additional interest of mine is the issue of skin color in Korean culture - the meaning of "blackness" in the Korean context. Winthrop Jordan explored this in his seminal work on the meaning of blackness in English culture during their first contact with Africans.

Click here for a look at an excerpt from a paper I wrote exploring the construction of "Libidinous Blacks" to get an idea of the type of work I'd like to in Korea. However, I think that my work would definitely be cut out for me. But then, I always welcome a challenge.

Here's a work of mine in Korean. I am studying with Kim Seung Hee, a visiting professor from Sogang University. She's an accomplished poet and writer, and I'm lucky to have had the opportunity to study with her here. Her visit was also made possible by Fulbright, so I once again owe them a debt of gratitude. The paper:

Hanbok, by the way, means "Korean traditional clothing." I wrote this paper as one of several I wrote for Professor Kim in her Korean composition class, but chose to include it here not only to provide a sample of my writing in Korean, but since it also relates to the topic of Korean national identity.

You need Korean web and system software to read this. For the Macintosh, all you need is the Korean Language Kit. Both Netscape and Microsoft Explorer have "Document Encoding" options. Just go up in the menu and change the setting. For PC users, I'm not actually too sure; I do think you need Korean Windows. What other programs you need, I really don't know. You can either click on the title in English above, or the title graphic below.

Here's a trip down memory lane ­ two papers I wrote for classes I took with Professor Gordon Wood during my junior year at Brown. Although earlier work, my experience in this class really started my intellectual engine. I was lucky to have a chance to take a class with this preeminent historian on the American colonial and revolutionary period.

These were both written when I was an undergraduate, so please cut me a bit of slack.

I wrote this paper when I was a junior for an American Civilization seminar called "The Woman and the Body: Reconstructing Sex, Constructing Gender." It had some cool appendices, but I haven't scanned them in. However, I think the text can speak for itself. This paper is on the phenomenon of female ejaculation and the ways in which male society constructs its conceptions of the female body (and all its associated functions). I submitted this with my application to the Berkeley Ethnic Studies program. Click on the title to read it.

Here are some books with which I either really connected, or just feel are well worth anyone's reading time. In no particular order:

Foundation - Isaac Asimov

The Great Thoughts - George Seldes

The History of Knowledge - Martin van Doren

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas S. Kuhn

The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould

American Holocaust - David E. Stannard

Iron Cages - Ronald Takaki

The End of History and the Last Man - Francis Fukuyama

The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb - Gar Alperovitz

Unreliable Sources ­ Martin A. Lee & Norman Sullivan

Above Top Secret - Timothy Good

For a look into some of these books, go to either the New York Times Book Review or Amazon Books (a huge Web bookstore). You'll find something on them.