The Possibilities and Visions of Public History Studies in Korea

This article is an attempt to explore one possible vision for public history research in Korea by suggesting what conditions and efforts would be required to establish public history as a field of history. The term public history implies the study and description of public history as it exists in reality. In this article, I use the term ‘public history’ to refer to the use of history outside of academia and ‘public history research’ to discuss public history as a field of history. There are many hurdles to overcome for public history to become a part of the discipline of history in Korea. What troubles historians the most is that among all the forms of history that take place in the public sphere, there are some that are irrelevant or contradictory to academic research, and some that even distort history. However, public history does not mean history that has already acquired publicness, and the process of competing claims and discourses is itself a phenomenon and form of public history. Public history can be categorized into 1) history to the public and 2) history in the public from the perspective of paying attention to the nature of the producer. In the former category, where the subject of production is clearly visible, historical reproductions made for the public exist in various forms in both offline and online spaces. This is what we call ‘historical (cultural) contents’, which is an important part of Korea’s public history. Although cultural contents studies, which was born as a Korean concept in the early 2000s, has been building its own identity as a discipline by giving birth to many conferences and journals, the field of historical cultural contents are not a subfield of cultural contents but a subfield of history, which raises the need to rethink public history from a perspective of public history. In addition, public history can be said to be a contemporary socio-cultural history, which means that it needs to be based on the understanding and research of cultural history perspectives and sectors, which has been a weak field in Korean history. The study of public history, as a current history, needs to be conducted in a way that encompasses theoretical discussions as well as practical techniques, and will trigger critical review in the field of history.