About the Speaker

Michael D. Shin is a lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the Japanese colonial period (1910–45), and he has published many articles on the intellectual, literary, and social history of the early twentieth century. .

After earning his BA at Harvard, he spent two years in Seoul learning Korean, and it was there that he decided to go into Korean Studies. He entered the MA program in Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley intending to study sociology or anthropology. However, for his MA thesis, he did research on the Tongnip sinmun, the first vernacular newspaper in Korea, and he enjoyed it so much that he decided to study Korean history instead. For his Ph.D., he moved to the Department of History at the University of Chicago. His dissertation examined the emergence of the discourse of the nation through the works of the writer Yi Gwangsu. During his graduate studies, he spent a total of three years in Korea, and he also spent one year in Japan at the Inter-University Center for Advanced Language Studies. From 2001, he taught in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University and then moved to Cambridge in the fall of 2008.