The East Asian Studies Lecture Series features Sonia Ryang discussing "A Letter from Afar: A story of repatriation and exile" on Friday (5/30) at 1:30 p.m. in 115 Mendenhall Labs. Sponsored by The Institute for Japanese Studies and the Korean Studies Initiative, the lecture will examine Koreans' repatriation to North Korea from Japan.

Ryang will focus on a letter that was written by a Korean woman in Japan, but never sent to the addressee and her high school classmate who repatriated to North Korea in the late 1970s. She will also discuss a chapter from her forthcoming book, titled Writing Selves in Diaspora: Ethnography of Autobiographics of Korean Women in Japan and the US.

Dr. Ryang received her PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University, England. After working as a research fellow at the Australian National University, she took an appointment at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she taught prior to moving to University of Iowa.

Her current research focus is on vulnerable population, first starting from the state of Iowa (immigrants, single-parent households, & low-income families with dependants with disabilities), with the hopes to comparatively inquire into Korea and Japan. More specifically, she is into the notion of what it means to be a human in the age of global war, terror, and injustice.

She is currently completing the book on diaspora, gender, and autobiographics (sole-author) on one hand, and finishing up another book (co-edited) on Korean diaspora in Japan, on the other.

Download the flyer for A Letter from Afar.