Active International Cooperation
The members of the department of Korean Studies have long records of international cooperation. Besides organizing international workshops and attending or putting together panels for the major international academic events of Korean and Asian Studies like AAS, AKSE, ICAS or the World Congresses of Korean Studies, they have maintained individual research cooperations with international partners. The department chair Professor Dr. Marion Eggert is on the editorial board of a number of journals such as Oriens Extremus, Acta Koreana, Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, and Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies.
In Europe and Germany
Within the "European League of Non-Western Studies" (ELNWS), the department is one of five institutes which form the Korean Studies Consortium (Korean Studies Institutes at Leiden, SOAS, La Sapienza/Rome, EHESS/Paris, RUB/Bochum). The mutual cooperation started in the form of joint teaching, i.e. rotative block seminars for graduate students at the participating universities. The first such ELNWS seminar on Korean Studies was held in Bochum in 2009. The Department of Korean Studies at RUB has also been able to successfully organize international workshops within the framework of the regular seminar program, financed by the "European Program of Exchange Lectures" (EPEL) program.
Cooperation in research consortia also constitutes an important factor regarding the successful efforts to consolidate the position of Korean Studies at Bochum. Professor Dr. Marion Eggert has been part of a research group on "cross-cultural and intercultural bioethics"; she was also actively involved in several trans-disciplinary research networks. In 2007, she helped to win a large research grant, the "International Research Consortium in the Humanities: Dynamics in the History of Religion between Europe and Asia", for Ruhr-University Bochum, in which researchers now participate in six-year research projects. Professor Eggert is chair of one of four research units of the consortium.
In 2009, the Korean Studies Institutes at Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) and Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), as leading institutions for Korean Studies in Europe, have been awarded the prestigious five-year grant from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS). Under the auspices of this AKS-FUB/RUB Institution Grant Project "Circulation of Knowledge and the Dynamics of Transformation" a unique hub of Korean Studies has been created in the heart of Europe. » more