Special Lecture (May 25): “How to Communicate with Aliens: A Comparative Study of North and South Korean Science Fiction”
The Center for East Asian Peace and Cooperation Studies is pleased to announce a joint lecture with the Korea Research Center featuring Dafna Zur of Stanford University. We warmly invite all interested participants to attend.
Title
How to Communicate with Aliens: A Comparative Study of North and South Korean Science Fiction
Date and Time
Monday, May 25, 2026 | 5:00 PM–6:30 PM
Venue
Suekawa Memorial Hall, Lecture Room
Ritsumeikan University Kinugasa Campus
Registration
Please register here.
Overview
Science fiction novels produced in North and South Korea during the 1950s and 1960s were more than works of imaginative literature; they were important cultural texts that reflected competing visions of the future shaped by each state in the aftermath of the Korean War.
This lecture compares science fiction from both Koreas to examine how science and technology, space exploration, and representations of the human subject were portrayed, and how these depictions were connected to each country’s national ideology and vision of modernization.
Through an exploration of North and South Korean science fiction, the lecture illuminates the intersection of political imagination and cultural representation during the Cold War era.
Speaker
Dafna Zur
Professor Zur specializes in Korean literature, film, and popular culture. She is the author of Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea (Stanford University Press, 2017), which examines children’s literature and the construction of future imaginaries in colonial and postcolonial Korea.
She is currently working on a project on moral education through youth science and literary magazines in postwar North and South Korea. She has published extensively on North Korean science fiction, representations of the Korean War, and Korean popular culture, and has also translated numerous works of Korean literature into English.