THE KOREA SOCIETY

Nicholas Harkness is the Modern Korean Economy and Society Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. At Harvard, he also organizes the Roman Jakobson Symposium and the Harvard-Yenching Institute Field Development Program in Linguistic and Semiotic Anthropology. 

Harkness’s long-term ethnographic research in South Korea has focused on language, music, and religion within the context of Korea’s massive engagement with Protestant Christianity in the 20th and 21st Centuries. He is the author of Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (2014) and Glossolalia and the Problem of Language (2021). Harkness’s scholarship and teaching have been recognized by numerous awards, including the Edward Sapir Book Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and an honorable mention for Francis L. Hsu Book Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology (American Anthropological Association), the Richard Saller Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation in the Division of Social Sciences (University of Chicago), and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching (Harvard University). Harkness is also the recipient of major grants and fellowships, including from the Social Science Research Council, the National Humanities Center (Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship), the Academy of Korean Studies, the Korea Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation (Hanna Holborn Gray Fellowship).