Rebels and Healers: Everyday Life in Early Modern Korea

3 units

This course explores the lives, struggles, and creative strategies of non-elite peoples in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Rather than focusing on kings and high officials, it centers slaves, women, artisans, monks, shamans, and “middle people” who navigated—and quietly reshaped—systems of power in everyday life. Drawing on legal cases, vernacular literature, ritual texts, and other unconventional sources, the course examines how these actors, much like us, grappled with socially constructed ideas of morality, gender, labor, and truth within the constraints of their own times and contexts. Ultimately, the course invites students to practice recovering marginal voices through “history from below” and to reconsider how telling these histories today reshapes our understanding of the past—and of what counts as important or meaningful history in the present.