Kyunghee Pyun
2021 US Scholar Program
Fashion Institute of Technology, NY

By training and expertise, I am an art historian. I got admitted to the department of archaeology and art history at Seoul National University in 1991. I graduated in 1995 and continued my graduate program at Seoul National University. After I completed the coursework in art history, I left for New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts to pursue a PhD in art history and archaeology in 1996. I have lived in New York City for almost 30 years. After I received my PhD in 2003/4, I taught at Pratt Institute, Hunter College, Parsons School of Design. Now I have been tenured professor of art history at State University of New York, Fashion Institute of Technology. As a student, I was an example of international education. I studied abroad in Boston as a language learner in 1995; visited many countries in Europe and Asia in the 1990s; participated in the summer study abroad programs in Rome and Florence.   

After I became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 2010, I have long been interested in being a Fulbright Scholar. But my students and I could not travel much in the early 2000s. It was a period of heightened security alert between the 9/11 Terrorist Attack and the 2008 Economic Crisis. To encourage my students to be inspired and motivated from my research, I collaborated with contributors and co-editors in France, Germany, U.K., Taiwan, China, Singapore, Japan, India, Australia, and Canada. I also work with three teaching partners in Tianjin Normal University, Universidad del Caribe, and UNESP in Brazil.  

When I taught Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) with international partners, virtually, for five years within the State University of New York system, I was astonished how the image of the US is different from person to person or from country to country. Before I applied for a Fulbright Scholar, I invited many Fulbright Scholars to campus or recommended students for Fulbright. I wanted to immerse myself in another country’s academic community and represent the United States. My goal was to strengthen a friendly, informed, and mutually rewarding relationship with international scholars in post 9/11 international politics. With this exchange of views and perspectives, my own disciplinary practices and subsequent teaching portfolios was amplified and enriched for more insightful and global approaches, which have brought a paradigm shift in my own field of research. From 2013, I transferred my expertise of visual culture to a new field of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies.  

I had an opportunity to visit Taiwan and Japan for research on my book project, School Uniforms in East Asia in 2019. When I was visiting The Korea University of Arts as a Fulbright Specialist for a few weeks, I realized that South Korea has established robust digital humanities initiatives as the country was praised as a leader of IT for higher education. It has a fastest internet service and has established a nationwide digital database in many academic disciplines. However, printed materials before 1945 are usually kept in special collections and digitized versions do not show an entire volume. For my analysis of visual culture, I needed to examine these sources in their physical formats not in digital reproduction. Accessibility to digital archives of Korean historical documents has been difficult outside South Korea due to verification of a person’s identity for non-Korean users without the resident registration number. These special collections have limited office hours. In addition, I wanted to get familiar with South Korean digital archives and to understand the rationale, which is related to specific cultural and technological assumptions or conditions.  

Thus, I was able to visit Seoul National University as a Fulbright Scholar after two weeks of quarantine in May 2021. By interacting with Professor Ku, her students and colleagues at Seoul National University, I was able to develop a comparative perspective discussing both East Asian and South Asian policies of school uniforms. As the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures has concentrations in West Asian Civilization; Southeast Asian Civilization; Indian Civilization; and Japanese Civilization, I also learned much about Southeast or South Asian culture of school uniforms. That was not part of my current research, but meeting experts of those areas was extremely meaningful. Seoul National University provided a unique environment in which Korean studies can be discussed in a pan-Asian context.  

I raised awareness of significance of Korean fashion for students and scholars in many design programs of higher education. In an ever-expanding field of material culture including, not limited to, sociology, anthropology, economic history, visual culture, art history, history of journalism, organizational psychology, or popular culture, Korean school uniform culture is not only unique to the country but also relevant in a pan-Asian context. My project certainly stimulated further discussion on the impact of modernity and imperialism in neglected areas such as military uniforms, school uniforms, women’s accessories, shoe manufacturing, or textile trades among colonized countries. My new book, History of Korean Dress: Critical Perspectives of Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2024) was being written during my period of Fulbright Scholars. Although it was not part of the proposed project for the Fulbright, that book benefitted from my encounter with Korean scholars and audiences who joined my talks virtually—in 2021 many events were still held as a remote gathering. These conversations that took place during the Fulbright Scholar Program will appear several times in my new book, School Uniforms in East Asia. Many interviewees of school uniform culture in the United States talked about their school years with nostalgia and longing for return, which gave me more questions and topics. After my term of the Fulbright Scholars was over, I launched a new project of multidisciplinary collaboration of home and homeland studies. Two books came out of that project: Multidisciplinary Representations of Home and Homeland in Diaspora (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature, 2024) and Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora: Transnational Reflections in Art, Literature, and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). 

The impact of the Fulbright Scholars was manifold. I got reconnected with my alma mater, Seoul National University as a transnational scholar and endured the COVID pandemic with new projects for the next decade. I then got invited to be a facilitator for the US University Administrators of International Education in June 2022. With this group, I took them to Ewha High School and its Ewha Centennial Hall and to Paechai Hakdang founded by Appenzeller in 1887 in Jeong-dong, Seoul. Administrators were ecstatic to dress up in school uniforms and sit down in rows in a classroom. My ongoing support for the Fulbright Korea will last for another few decades.