Daniel Pieper is a Korea Foundation Lecturer in Korean Studies at Monash University. He specializes in modern Korean language and literary history. His current research focuses on the emergence of vernacular Korean as a discrete subject in the modern school, the textual differentiation process of cosmopolitan Hanmun and vernacular Korean, and the role of language ideology in directing language standardization in pre-colonial and colonial-era Korea. His most recent book is titled Redemption and Regret: Modernizing Korea in the Writings of James Scarth Gale (2021) and examines themes of vernacularization, linguistic modernity, and literary translation in the missionary’s unpublished writings.

Education

I joined Monash in June of 2022 as a Korea Foundation Lecturer in Korean Studies. Prior to this, I was a Lecturer in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Washington University in St. Louis (2019-2022). Before that I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia (2018-2019) and a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University (2017-2018).

I received a BA in Political Science from the University of Missouri-Columbia (1999-2003). Following graduation, I taught English for six years in Gunsan and Daejeon, South Korea where I developed a keen interest in Korean history and culture, and especially the Korean language and education system. I returned to graduate school and received an MA in East Asian Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, where I wrote a thesis on the Korean Language Movement in colonial Korea (1910-1945). I went on to do a PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, writing a dissertation titled “Korean as a Transitional Literacy: Language Education, Curricularization, and the Vernacular-Cosmopolitan Interface in Early Modern Korea, 1895-1925,” which investigated the emergence of vernacular Korean as a subject in modern schools immediately before and during the Korean colonial period. The dissertation was completed in conjunction with a Fulbright Junior Researcher Fellowship which supported my research at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea (2016-2017).

I am available to supervise HDR students in the following areas: 

Korean sociolinguistics

The cultural history of Korean

Vernacularization in Korea and East Asia

Translation theory and pedagogy

Language ideology and language policy

Literary history

Christianity in Korea

Please contact me to discuss your proposed area of study. 

Teaching

I have over twenty years of teaching experience, first as an English language instructor in South Korea. Since then I have taught a range of content on Korea, including pre-modern and modern Korean history, contemporary Korean culture, pre-modern and contemporary Korean literature, the history of the Korean language, North and South history and relations, and Korean cinema. I have also taught the Korean language at all levels, including literary translation workshops.