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The 2026 Winner of The UC Berkeley
Hong Yung Lee Book Award
in Korean Studies
The Center for Korean Studies (CKS) at UC Berkeley is honored to announce the 2026 winner of the UC Berkeley Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies: Triangle Republics: Cross-Border Literary Transits between the Cold War Koreas and Japan (Columbia University Press, 2025) by Professor I. Jonathan Kief (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
Triangle Republics is a groundbreaking contribution to literary studies of Korea and beyond, one that turns the production and circulation of texts into the occasion for rethinking the impact of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula and its diaspora. Upending the conventional view of the Korean division as one of separation and antagonism between two diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive cultural spheres, the book reveals how North and South Korean literature surreptitiously formed and transformed each other through the Korean diaspora in Japan. Following the circuit of Korean texts via Japan from 1945 until the 1980s, Kief uncovers the creative ways that writers, critics, and intellectuals crossed the boundaries of nation, language, ideology, and genre to challenge Cold War entrenchments. This required tracking not only Korean language texts, but also Japanese language ones, often published in obscure journals, painstakingly gathered from multiple archives through rigorous research employing cross-disciplinary tools and methods. The result is a work that changes not only what we know about Cold War Korean literature, but also how we might write cultural and intellectual history when the nation-state is no longer assumed to be its natural container.
An award ceremony celebrating Professor Kief’s achievement will be held at UC Berkeley on Thursday, March 4, 2027.
Established in 2022 to honor Berkeley Political Science Professor and longtime CKS Chair Hong Yung Lee (1939-2017), each year this award and its $10,000 prize recognizes a groundbreaking, English-language academic monograph that advances Korean Studies by combining scholarly merit, research prowess, and methodological innovation. The award recognizes Professor Lee's enduring influence on Korean Studies, but also commitment to situating the field in a broad intellectual landscape.
The Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley is deeply grateful to all of the authors and publishers who participated in this year’s competition. We would also like to thank Berkeley’s Korean Studies faculty for participating in the first-round selection process; and especially this year’s external second-round review committee: Suzy Kim (Rutgers), Sujung Kim (Hopkins), and Youngju Ryu (Michigan).
We will soon make a separate announcement about next year’s competition, which will be open to Korean Studies monographs published in 2025 and 2026.
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