Climate, Time, and the Nation: Korea 1000-1900

Thursday, 9 July 2026, 5pm to 6pm

Day and Time: 5pm on Thursday 9 July
Venue: Wolfson College, Seminar Room 2

Speaker: Dr. Thomas N.D.E Quartermain, Assistant Professor of History, Chair of the Korean Studies Minor in Underwood International College, and Residential Master of Appenzeller House, Yonsei University.

What can the past teach us about the environment and our relationship to the natural world? This special lecture will unveil hidden information from government records and personal diaries from the medieval Koryo era, through the early-modern Choson kingdom, to the fall of the Korean Empire in 1910. Although researchers focus on quantitative data to reconstruct historic conditions, qualitative descriptions reveal additional historical weather patterns and natural phenomena. The lecture will report on developments in an on-going digital humanities' project to build a repository of natural phenomena on time and the weather from a range of sources. The lecture will review the state of the project and offer some tentative analyses.

Venue: Wolfson College
Linton Road Oxford
Venue details: Lecture Room 2

Department: Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Department)