David C. Oh
2018 US Scholar Program
Syracuse University, NY
I am currently an Associate Professor of Communication at Syracuse University. I was a Fulbright Senior Scholar during the 2018-2019 academic year on a Teaching Award with a proposal to teach critical media studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. I mostly teach courses in media literacy, media and race, research methods, and intercultural communication. My research sits at the intersection of Korean popular culture studies, Asian American media studies, and ethnic and racial studies.
I’d long been motivated to apply for a Fulbright because of the opportunity to live, study, and work in South Korea. When I had the opportunity to apply, I took the chance, applying for a Research/Teaching Award in the previous year (2017-18). My proposal fell through at the review stage in South Korea. I believed that because, at the time, I was working at Ramapo College of New Jersey, a small teaching college that few people know outside of the state, reviewers found my application to be non-competitive. The following year, I applied for a Teaching Award. It turns out, however, that when I met with Fulbright Korea, my earlier Teaching/Research application was rejected not because of the quality of the application but because I did not include the optional letter of invitation, which made my placement complicated. I don’t regret it, however, because the experiences in the classroom are ones that continue to resonate for me and because my teaching load was relatively low and my service obligations non-existent, I was able to have one of my most productive research years.
As a Fulbrighter, we, oftentimes, don’t go alone but go with some or all of our families. Fulbright is the only major award or fellowship that values the family, and, for me, another motivation to apply was because my children were just entering their adolescent years, and I know that it is a formative time as they develop their identities. For my children, who are third-generation Korean Americans, being in Korea was eye-opening, and they came to feel more affinity to their ancestral homeland, and their ethnic identities were strengthened as a result. It is a shared experience about which we continue to have conversations. Although having lived in Korea before meant that it wasn’t quite personally transformative for me, it was deeply transformative for my children.
Where it was transformational was in my work as a scholar. Before the Fulbright, I had not been invited to give a public talk in my career, but during my Fulbright, multiple leading universities, including in Seoul, Macau, and Indonesia invited me to give talks. This probably didn’t matter much to my career in a tangible sense, but it was a much-needed boost of confidence. I’d been a productive scholar, but it, at times, felt like no one really cared what I wrote. Being in Korea helped me realize that maybe it isn’t me as much as it’s my environment. In addition to giving public talks and developing a broader and deeper network, I also completed most of a book and started work on another. Sitting on the subway, I’d intentionally resist the lure of my phone and forced myself to sit with a spiral notebook, instead. The dullness of the trips focused attention and energy on the book, and I was able to work through some important theoretical obstacles, which eventually propelled the book forward.
The book I later started was my first solo work in Korean media. As a critical scholar of media, I’d thought about Korean media largely from the perspective of reception in the U.S. – by second-generation Korean diaspora adolescents and by fans. These were, then, still largely Americanist projects that were interested in transnationalism, identities, and media. On the other hand, all of my previous work on Korean media were written with a “native” Korean scholar as a way to counter my own lack of confidence making arguments about the Korean media culture and to avoid being a Western-centric scholar writing about Korea. The next book I edited examined alterity in Korean media culture, an idea I had previously abandoned when a co-editor dropped out. I had the confidence to move forward with it because my colleagues in Korea told me that they trusted me with it and to not be “stupid” about my concerns. They encouraged me by claiming that a lot of Westerners write about Korea in ways that read as ridiculous to them and so they found it necessary that someone they trusted to write about Korea in credible ways was doing the work. So, I edited that book, and I wrote an article on what might be easiest to understand as the manosphere in Korea. These efforts signaled a shift in my scholarly agenda and recognition that have led to carving out a space in Korean Studies. I think I would’ve avoided this if I hadn’t been in Korea for the Fulbright.
Overall, I cannot express enough how meaningful the Fulbright Award was. It was personally meaningful for me, it was transformative for my children, and it was professionally generative as a scholar.
