27–28 August 2026
The Return of the Pre-Digital World?
Digitally Mediated Nostalgia in Korea
In recent years, South Korea has seen a marked surge in retro and “newtro” phenomena across popular media and consumer culture. Nostalgic references are no longer confined to marginal or subcultural contexts. In particular, the late twentieth century has come to serve as a major point of reference. Television dramas set in this period, revived musical styles (often summed up by the labels “70/80” or “80/90”), analog-looking technologies, and vintage design have become staples of contemporary Korean popular culture — bringing the material culture and lived experience of pre-digital everyday life back to the fore. One of the most striking expressions of this trend is the growing number of dramas and films that revisit earlier decades via science-fiction time travel (rather than by means of flashbacks or straightforward period settings), thereby creating emotionally immersive encounters with the past that often engage in dialogue with the present.
We invite contributions that examine nostalgia in contemporary Korea as a mediated cultural phenomenon. This mediation takes place not only through representational forms, but also at the level of infrastructure: streaming services, social media, online archives, and digital marketplaces have made earlier cultural materials widely available and continually accessible, enabling new forms of remembering, collecting, and reusing the past. We seek to explore why and how the digital media environment contributes to this proliferation of references to the past and facilitates their production and circulation.
3–4 October 2025
Analog Memory, Digital Vision?
Rethinking the Humanities in Global Korean Studies
Digital technologies have permeated academic inquiry, yet their ubiquity risks sidelining the enduring strengths of analog scholarship in the humanities, potentially eclipsing hermeneutic epistemologies without adequate compensation for their loss and obscuring lessons computational methods could still learn from exegetical traditions. Can unchecked enthusiasm for the digital preclude nuanced insights emerging from human-scale interpretative practice grounded in rigorous scholarly training? Does digital augmentation introduce fundamentally new dimensions of sense-making? Are retro or “Newtro” aesthetics merely nostalgic revivals, or do they, in some way, represent telling responses to broader dynamics—pointing to a growing disenchantment, most starkly reflected in digital withdrawal?