Intro

My name is Wonhee Cho (조원희/趙元熙 Ph. D. History, Yale University), and I am a historian of the Mongol empire (13th to 14th century). Currently I am an associate professor at the Department of History, College of Liberal Arts, Yonsei University. Previously, I have been worked as an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Korean Studies (Global Korean Studies major), at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS, 韓國學中央研究院 韓國學大學院)

As a historian of the Mongol empire, I am particularly interested in religion, comparative empire studies, and digital humanities. My dissertation focused on the different religions of the Mongol empire in China – Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, and Islam (among others) – and how they interacted with the imperial government. I have also followed and participated in the recent trends of Digital Humanities, with some degree of enthusiasm, and equal amount of caution.

My academic interest in the Mongols and other nomads, and their interactions with other peoples is closely related to my life, since I constantly moved around different places and adapted to different cultures. Born in South Korea, I lived in Australia when I was three to nine years old, and some people say they can still hear my Australian accent. As an undergraduate I studied at Seoul National University as an English Language and Literature major (B.A.), joined the Asian History Department M.A. program, a program where I studied Chinese (classical and modern), Japanese and Persian.

In 2014, I completed my six-year long Ph. D. Studies at Yale University. I often forget to mention that during the six-year period at Yale I spent a whole year at Beijing University as a visiting research student. Before coming back to Korea, I was a member of the Mongol empire project 2014 to 2017 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where I translated and tagged data of more than 65 individuals from the Yuanshi biographies. This translation work consists of 141,610  English words and 9,633 Chinese characters. I also spent half a year as a post-doc at NYU Shanghai where I was able to conduct my own research and also organize a panel for the Center for Global Asia Annual Conference: Ports and Port Cities in Indian Ocean Connections. I also I worked at the Jangseogak Archives of the AKS as a project manager / researcher for 3 years.

Even though it’s a bit outdated, my former home institution (Academy of Korean Studies) published a profile of me (in Korean), and it is available here.