The Cervantes Institute immerses South Korea in Hispanic Studies

The Cervantes Institute and Casa Asia will hold today, 9 December (at 10 a.m.), the conference "500 years of the encounter between East and West: Hispanism in South Korea", which will be given by Professor Jeong-hwan Shin, vice-rector of the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

The event, via videoconference, will include the intervention of Carmen Pastor Villalba, academic director of the Cervantes Institute, and the participation of Yasmin Paricio, coordinator of the Department of Politics, Society and Educational Programmes of Casa Asia, who will moderate the subsequent debate. It will be the sixth activity of the series of online conferences on Hispanism in Asia-Pacific organised by Casa Asia and the Cervantes Institute.

Professor Jeong-hwan Shin, former president of the Korean Association of Hispanists (2019-2021), will talk about the history that Spain and South Korea have shared, their current relations, the perspectives of Hispanism and the teaching of Spanish, which began in the Korean university in 1955. Since then, the status of Spanish has been consolidated and interest in learning it has grown throughout the country, where the Instituto Cervantes has a Cervantes Classroom in the capital, Seoul.

Jeong-hwan Shin is a specialist in Hispanic literature, especially the contemporary Spanish-American novel, Don Quixote, Baroque and neo-baroque aesthetics and comparative literature. He has published books on Hispanic literature and culture and various articles in academic journals. He has also translated Meditación del Quijote (Ortega y Gasset), Novelas ejemplares (Cervantes) and Hispanic World (John H. Elliott ed.) into Korean, among others.

The lecture and discussion will be available live on YouTube at 10:00 h (CET).

Submitted by José Antonio Sierra, Hispanismo Advisor