Joo-hyeon Oh: President's Postdoctoral Fellow

The Department of History was delighted to welcome Dr. Joo-hyeon Oh as a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow last year after her completion of a PhD in history and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. In fall 2025, she will start a tenure-track assistant professorship in our department.

What brought you to the University of Minnesota?

UMN's strong tradition as one of the best research institutions in the country, and the wonderful history department with excellent historians engaged in cutting-edge scholarship and meaningful community engagement.

UMN is also a place where I can be in the same community as many talented China specialists in all fields (literature, art history, political science, anthropology, history of science, etc.), the company of whom I greatly value.

It also has the East Asian Library (with its own wonderful librarian, Shuqi Ye), which helps to facilitate my research. I feel lucky and honored to join the University and a department with a long and significant tradition in Ming Studies.

What are your areas of specialty? How did you become interested in what you study and teach?

I am a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern China, specializing in natural history and philosophy. Researching the history of pre- and early-modern society and culture involves recovering something that’s (partially or entirely) gone or lost, and imagining what it would have been like, based on limited evidence. My journey to this field had seeds in my youth but really bore fruit in college.

I grew up in Korea. I was a kid obsessed with ancient Chinese and Korean history and historical fiction. I never questioned their relevance until I immigrated to the US, where I started high school. I soon discovered that in American society, histories of societies outside the US and Europe only existed at the margin (simply studied as “the rise of X,” “cultural encounters,” and such). As I tried to assimilate myself to this new environment, I simply accepted that way of thinking about the world for a while even though it disconnected me from both the country that I left and my adopted home. 

It was only in college that my interest in Chinese history was rekindled. I was sitting in the opening lecture of Early Chinese History class at UC-Berkeley and I remembered the joy and passion I used to feel. Studying the history of China and East Asia, I found a space where I felt at ease and a sense of belonging, anchored in the field where important parts of me are recognized, understood, and given meanings.

I also was intrigued, because the history of China and Japan, as well as Korea, wasn’t told in exactly the same way as what I was taught as a young student in South Korea. The experience started as a (nostalgic) reconnection, but it led to a new view of the world. 

What questions and ideas are you most interested in exploring right now? What problems does your work seek to address?

I have always been curious about how we as humans have grappled with “strange” phenomena and mysteries of the universe. For my first book project, tentatively titled Something’s In the Air, I plan to focus on phenomena that happen “out of thin air,” such as the mirage, thunder-lightning, echoes, and ghosts and spirits. In Chinese thought, all of these come down to the problem of “qi” that forms and animates all things in the world, both material and immaterial. Some things are deemed more real and less “strange” or “believable” than others, depending on the time, place, and people. Many features that are known to exist in outer space, such as dark matter and black holes, sometimes feel fantastic to me, a lay reader of science. I think it’s the mixed sense of reality and imagination that continues to inspire wonder and curiosity in me and many others. I love science fiction and ghost stories for the same reason!

Indeed, interaction (rather than opposition) between reasoned knowledge and imagination creates complex, creative, and diverse ways of experiencing the world. This crisscrossing of disciplinary boundaries summarizes my approach to early modern Chinese natural knowledge and distinct worldview. 

What courses do you look forward to teaching? What's special about them?

I have proposed a first-year seminar on Philosophies for Change: Lessons from the “Hundred Schools” in Ancient China. I am also looking forward to teaching a course on late Imperial China (circa the 14th century to 1912), the period in which many social and cultural institutions and practices that are now recognized as essentially "Chinese" (such as lineages and ancestral rituals) began to form and fully developed. China before the twentieth century was not simply “Confucian,” seen as socially static, culturally conservative and isolated from the outside world. The literature produced during this period is surprisingly full of material obsessions, sexual ribaldry, reckless violence, and moral ambiguity and subversion. Some of the best-known works produced during this period explore boundaries of gender and ethnicity. I am eager to lead students on a journey that explores this exciting world, full of surprising ambiguities and contrasts, bursting with creativity and rigor.

What are some takeaways students will get from your courses?

In both teaching and research, I value human intellectual diversity. Exploring different traditions of thought across time and place broadens our own worlds and perspectives.

In my first-year seminar students will read the works of major ancient Chinese thinkers such as Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Zhuangzi, Laozi, Hanfeizi, and Sunzi. Born in turbulent and violent times, each of these thinkers struggled to find a unique and effective solution to the problem of how to build a better society. Through close reading and critical analysis of passages written by each of them, students will have the opportunity not only to explore different ethical theories developed in ancient China, but also to reflect and evaluate their own values and perspectives. And, of course, students are welcome to develop and share their own perspectives on these and the issues we discuss in class. This is how we learn and grow together, collectively.