Join the GW Institute for Korean Studies for our next installment of our Premodern Lecture Series, featuring Ksenia Chizhova from Princeton University. Professor Chizhova will present on her topic, "From King’s Body to Queen’s Hand: Royal Vernacular Calligraphy in Korea".

This presentation performs an archaeology of Korean royal bodies to excavate the vernacular hand—palace style calligraphy (kungch’e 宮體) that developed in the seventeenth century. This aestheticized cursivization of the Korean script marked the emergence of vernacular courtly culture that had its roots in the epistolary greeting (munan 問安) decorum of the royal family. Tracing the contested history of palace style calligraphy—the graphic prototype of most widely used Korean fonts, and a historical phenomenon that was first disavowed and then overdetermined by nationalist discourses in the two Koreas—this presentation identifies vernacular calligraphic training as gender-bending culture of the Korean royal family that instituted carnal continuities across the divide of kingly and queenly embodiment, strictly demarcated at court as political sphere.