Professor Marc Shell, Professor of English at Harvard University, will visit Korea under the auspices of the Asia Institute and Kyung Hee University for two weeks in December. Professor Shell has just completed a remarkable book that explains the culture and politics of islands over the century. This new field of knowledge, what he calls “Islandology” has much to offer to East Asia. Profesosr Shell will no doubt have much to say to us in terms of his comparative views on Dokdo and Diaoyutai (Takeshima/Senkaku).
Professor Marc Shell CV
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mshell/
Will let you know soon about his planned lectures.
Islandology
“Islandology: Geography, Rhetoric, Politics”
(Stanford University Press, 2014)
Islandology is a fast-paced, fact-filled comparative essay in critical topography and cultural geography that cuts across different cultures and argues for a world of islands. The book explores the logical consequences of geographic place for the development of philosophy and the study of limits (Greece) and for the establishment of North Sea democracy (England and Iceland), explains the location of military hot-spots and great cities (Hormuz and Manhattan), and sheds new light on dozens of world-historical productions whose motivating islandic aspect has
not heretofore been recognized (Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung). Written by Shell in view of the melting of the world’s great ice islands, Islandology shows not only new ways that we think about islands but also why and how we think by means of them.
