the then lab

The THEN Lab's journey - milestone events

August 2026

• PI's paper titled "Toxic ignorance: South Korea’s inattentive nuclear waste management in the Cold War period" is accepted for publication in History and Technology (A&HCI).

• Lab's affiliated scholar Dr. Jin-Woo Choi's co-authored paper titled “Cold Diplomacy: Ottoman-European Relations in the Wake of the Great Winter of 1709” (with M. Fatih Çalısır and Faisal Husain) is provisionally accepted for publication in Past & Present (SSCI, A&HCI). Our wholehearted congratulations!

• Lab's affiliated researcher Gunha Kim (U. Toronto) presented at the "Fifteenth Biennial Iranian Studies Conference" at Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Well done!

July 2026

• Lab's affiliated scholar Dr. Kyungtaek Kwon (PNU) has successfully conducted Lab-commissioned archival work at Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kamchatskogo Kraya (State Archive of Kamchatka Territory), Russia. The valualbe materials gathered by Dr. Kwon have almost never been introduced outside Russia. Our heartfelt congratulations!

• Lab's affiliated scholar Dr. Jin-Woo Choi begins his tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Our sincere congratulations! 

May 2026

• MinJae Kim, my former student at KAIST and a talented scholar, won first place of the Falling Walls Lab San Francisco Bay Area and is going to present at the 18th Falling Walls Science Summit in November in Berlin, Germany. Our sincere congratulations!

April 2026

• Lab's affiliated scholar Dr. Donghyeok Choi (HKBU)'s original paper titled "Meritocracy with Multiple Rules: How Special Civil Service Examinations Reproduced Privilege in Joseon Korea" is accepted for publication in the prestigious Social Science History (SSCI, A&HCI). Our warm congratulations!

March 2026

• Lab's affiliated scholar Dr. Kwangyeol Ko begins his tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Yonsei University. Our sincere congratulations! 

February 2026

• Lab's affiliated scholar Dr. Donghyeok Choi (HKBU)'s original paper titled "Analysis of the Annals of Joseon Dynasty: Careers of Bureaucrats, System of Governance, and Stability" is accepted for publication in the prestigious Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications (SCI). Our joyful congratulations!

January 2026

• PI's co-authored paper titled "Mapping the semantic transformations of major powers in Cold War East Asia: A Word Embedding approach using Chinese and Korean newspapers (1946–1995)" (with Byungjun Kim and Jonghyun Jee) is accepted for publication in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (SSCI, A&HCI).

December 2025

• PI's paper titled "Squid and Socialists: Power, Nature and the Unruly East Sea in North Korea, 1945–1964" is accepted for publication in Environment and History (SSCI, A&HCI).

• PI's paper titled "Catching Weasels in Silent Mountains: A Multispecies History of Hunting in North Korea from the 1940s to the 1960s" was published in Acta Koreana (A&HCI).

April 2025

• Lab's affiliated scholar Dr. Kyungtaek Kwon (GIST)'s original paper titled "Инспекционная поездка К. Е. Ворошилова на Дальний Восток (1931)" is accepted for publication in the prestigious Российская история (A&HCI). Our heartfelt congratulations!

February 2025

• Lab's affiliated researcher Jonghyun Jee has been adimitted to the PhD in Media, Technology, and Society (MTS) program in the School of Communication at Northwestern. Our heartfelt congratulations!

• Lab's affiliated researcher Gunha Kim secured a Research and Professional Development Grant by the University of Toronto for attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the Université de Montréal campus ($2,900 CAD, roughly $2,000 USD). Congratulations!

From June 2024 to February 2025

• The Lab gathered more than 110,000 pages of Korea-related materials from eight countries overseas (link), an endeavor that was made possible by the grant from the "Glocal University Project Group in Andong National University-Gyeongbuk Provincial College" Project, supported by the Ministry of Education and National Research Foundation of Korea (₩200,000,000, roughly $137,000).

May 2024 

• Lab's affiliated researcher Jonghyun Jee presented at "Digital Korea: Stories, systems and spaces of connection" hosted by University of Sheffield. Well done!

March 2024

• Lab's affiliated researcher Dr. Donghyeok Choi secured a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hong Kong. Big congrats!

From June to November 2023

• The Lab collected more than 27,000 pages of historical materials related to South Korea's nuclear waste history from the National Archives of Korea. The Lab's affiliated RAs Seulgi Lee and Hyun Ah Keum completed scanning works as of Summer 2024.

June 2023

• The Lab was commissioned to create a AI-powered historical knowledge information platform (link) and advance research on digital humanities with the generous endowment from Booyoung Group (₩350,000,000, roughly $240,000).