Oct 21, 2026

Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions

The Roots of Modern Korean

Daniel Pieper

Hosted by Leslie Hickman

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Summary

Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions: The Roots of Modern Korean (U Toronto Press, 2026) traces the emergence of vernacular Korean as a distinct subject of study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Centering on school textbooks as key sites of change, Daniel Pieper reveals how language education became instrumental in forging modern Korean literacy and identity. The book situates this process within broader global patterns of vernacularization and nation-building across East Asia, Europe, and South Asia. Introducing the concept of “transformative bilingualism,” it argues that Korea’s language modernization – while catalyzed by colonial influence – ultimately reshaped both Korean and Japanese literacies.

Daniel Pieper is a Korea Foundation Lecturer in Korean Studies at Monash University. He specializes in modern Korean language and literary history. His current research focuses on the emergence of vernacular Korean as a discrete subject in the modern school, the textual differentiation process of cosmopolitan Hanmun and vernacular Korean, and the role of language ideology in directing language standardization in pre-colonial and colonial-era Korea.

Buy Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions here

Dr. Pieper’s University Profile: here

Dr. Pieper on Academia.edu Profile: here

More by the author: "Foreign Objects or One Wing of the Same Bird? The Place of Hancha in Modern Korean Identity" in The Politics of Script and Language here

"Language Policy and Vernacular Education in Korea up to 1945" in Handbook of Language Policies in East Asia here

About the host: Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at leslie.hickman@emory.edu