Javier Cha

I am a historian of medieval Korea and a graduate student (ABD) in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.  My dissertation project proposes an alternative explanation for the reception of Confucianism in medieval Korea.

I am an intellectual and cultural historian by training, but in recent years ventured into social science history.  My research draws inspiration from the early Annales School and the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias with the long-term goal of producing new kinds of historical understanding through exploration of interplays between the Korean peninsula and the Eurasian continent at multiple levels of temporality and social figuration.  More specifically, I am interested in situating the historical developments in the Korean peninsula in the context of macrohistorical transition in Eastern Eurasia from the medieval world of diplomatic parity to the emergent world of early modern empires between the outbreak of the An Lushan Rebellion in 755 and the collapse of Mongol hegemony in the fourteenth century.

As an intellectual historian, I research a neoclassical form of Confucian humanism that in Chinese literature is commonly referred to as the ancient-style prose movement (古文運動).  Neo-Classicism, rather than Neo-Confucianism as it is commonly assumed, functioned as the principal epistemological framework informing courtly, intellectual, literary, and leisurely activities in East Asian societies in the later medieval and early modern eras.  This new framework, I believe, allows us to make better sense of intellectual developments and literary-artistic trends in early modern Korea, including the rise of local Neo-Confucianism and statecraft studies, the tension between imitative and expressive poetics, and the spread of antiquarianism.

A former programmer, I also closely follow the current developments in the IT industry and am an active advocate of computational approaches to historical research.