Jie-Hyun Lim (; born 1959) is a South Korean historian, writer, and "memory activist."Seung-jun Kwon, “A Historian Who Fights Narrow Nationalism: Why Did He Open the Holocaust Gypsy Exhibition? [편협한 민족주의와 싸우는 역사학자, 홀로코스트 집시展 연 까닭은?]” Daily Chosun, 16 February 2019. https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2019/02/15/2019021501743.html.Tae-hoon Kim, “Memory Is the Power to Blast the Dichotomous History [기억은 이분법적 역사에 파열음을 내는 힘].” The Kyunghyang Shinmun, 30 May 2020, https://m.khan.co.kr/national/national-general/article/202005301203011#c2b. He is a full professor of transnational history and the director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul, who conceptualized paradigms of "Mass Dictatorship"Yun-ju Lee, “Jie-Hyun Lim, From ‘Mass Dictatorship’ to ‘the Transnational’ [임지현, ‘대중독재’서 ‘트랜스내셔널’로],” Weekly Hankook, 23 March 2011. http://weekly.hankooki.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=4185294.Jung-mo Gu, “How Were ‘Fascism in Us’ and ‘Mass Dictatorship’ Born? ['우리 안의 파시즘'·'대중독재'는 어떻게 태어났나]” Yonhap News Agency, 14 December 2016. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20161214127300005.Dong-kyu Kim, "Ji-Hyun Lim, a Professor at Hanyang University, Listed on ‘Marquis Who’s Who' [임지현 한양대 교수, '마르퀴즈 후즈 후' 등재]," Yonhap News Agency, 4 December 2013. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20131204052800004 and "Victimhood Nationalism."Sang-hyun Park, “Can Conflicts Be Sealed When All Ethnicities Are Victims? [모든 민족이 '피해자'인 시대…갈등은 봉합될 수 있을까]” Yonhap News Agency, 11 August 2021. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20210811148000005.Young-hee Kim et al., “[News analysis] The comfort women movement at crossroads after 30 years,” The Hankyoreh, 27 May 2020.https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/946751.html.Hye-in Lee, "‘Is Korea a Sheer Victim of Foreign Power?’: Professor Ji-Hyun Lim, the Author of Victimhood Nationalism [“한국은 외세의 피해자이기만 한가요?” ‘희생자의식 민족주의’ 쓴 임지현 교수]," The Kyunghyang Shinmun, 16 August 2021. https://m.khan.co.kr/culture/culture-general/article/202108161945001#c2b. Since Lim founded the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture in 2004,Hye-jin Bae, “Professor Lim Ji-Hyun, Director of the Comparative History and Culture Research Institute [비교역사문화연구소 소장 임지현 교수].” News H, 15 April 2011. http://www.newshyu.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=6804. he has carried out a series of international projects, including the "East Asian History Forum for Criticism and Solidarity"Ji-soo Lee. “Nationalism and Mass Dictatorships.” Asia Research News, 18 Oct 2012. https://www.asiaresearchnews.com/html/article.php/aid/7457/cid/2/research/people/hanyang_university/nationalism_and_mass_dictatorships.html. and the "Flying University of Transnational Humanities."Joong-ho Choi. “Into Transnational Humanities.” News H, 15 April 2011. http://www.newshyu.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=6813.
Lim has written and edited around two dozen books, including Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing (Columbia University Press, 2022), Everyday Fascism (우리 안의 파시즘, 2000), and Victimhood Nationalism (희생자의식 민족주의, 2021). He is a co-editor of Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (2011), Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past: Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century (2014), The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship (2016), and Mnemonic Solidarity: Global Interventions (2021), among other works.
Lately, Lim has been delving into the field of “transnational history [and memory] as an alternative narrative to the national [one],” asserting that memory beneath history should be deterritorialized.“From Western History to Miscellaneous History and Memory Activism in Postcolonial Korea – An Interview With Jie-Hyun Lim.” Comparativ, vol. 26, no. 6, Dec. 2016, pp. 107-24. p.124. https://www.comparativ.net/v2/article/download/521/443/788. He is also conceptualizing "Global Easts" that are neither Global North nor Global South, thereby developing the problem consciousness of his 2022 publication from the perspective of the global history of modernity.
Life
Early life Ji-Hyun Lim was born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea, not long after the conclusion of the Korean War (1950⎼1953).Young-sik Hwang, “People Who Think outside the Box (9): Professor Ji-Hyun Lim, Hanyang University [고정관념을 깨는 사람들 <9>: 한양대 임지현 교수],” The Hankook Ilbo, 28 May 2004. https://www.hankookilbo.com/News/Read/200405280017364645. At that time, the Military coup d'état in May 1961 established Park Chung Hee’s regime (1961⎼1979) of Development Dictatorship,Eun Heo, "Development Dictatorship [개발독재(開發獨裁)]," Encyclopedia of Korean Culture [한국민족문화대백과사전], 2010.http://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Contents/Item/E0067722. with its gilded slogans—“Korean way of democracy” and “the National Regeneration” (Yu-shin Constitution). As Lim retrospects, “[t]he shattered Cold War constellation provided the conditions for Park to proclaim a state of emergency, which rationalized the shift from democracy to dictatorship,” in which “the individual selves voluntarily sacrifice[d] themselves for the higher self or absolute ego of the nation.”Jie-Hyun Lim, “Introduction: Between Two Global Easts,” in Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).
In 1977 when Lim was attending Sogang University as a history student and university newspaper reporter, a police investigator visited Lim's house because he was a member of “Red Clay” (황토 [hwang-t'o]), a clandestine anti-autocracy circle of Sogang University.Sang-jin Yoon, “Ji-Hyun Lim, Professor of History at Sogang University, Breaks the Boundaries of History [역사의 경계를 허물다, 임지현 서강대 사학과 교수], ” Sogang News Weekly, 24 October 2017. https://pr.sogang.ac.kr/front/boardview.do?bbsConfigFK=263&pkid=745231.Jae-seok Ko, "Ji-Hyun Lim, 'Cho Kuk and Lim Jong-Seok; If They Are Genuine Leftists, They Should Be Ashamed' [임지현 '조국·임종석, 진짜 좌파라면 부끄러워할 줄 알아야']," Shindongah, 21 August 2020. https://shindonga.donga.com/3/all/13/2155964/1 This experience led Lim to learn about his late grandfather’s past as a troika of the Korean Communist Party and an independence fighter during the Japanese occupation.Jie-Hyun Lim, Doing History [역사를 어떻게 할 것인가: 어느 사학자의 에고 히스토리] (Seoul: Sonamoo Publishing [소나무], 2016), 14. Lim confesses in his autobiography, Doing History (역사를 어떻게 할 것인가: 어느 사학자의 에고 히스토리, 2016), that he has always thought of his academic pursuit as participating in his grandfather's “inner exile.”
After the outbreak of the Gwangju Uprising (1980), Lim felt a strong sense of survivor's shame, which spurred him to study Marxist intellectual history as a graduate student at Sogang University.Jie-Hyun Lim, “The Politics of Shame [부끄러움의 정치학],” The Hankook Ilbo, 25 December 2013. https://www.hankookilbo.com/News/Read/201312241269665129. Above all, Lim wanted to establish "South Korean social science" or "South Korean Western history” based on the problem consciousness of his society, where the aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising came as too heavy a task for South Korean historians.Jie-Hyun Lim, Doing History [역사를 어떻게 할 것인가: 어느 사학자의 에고 히스토리] (Seoul: Sonamoo Publishing [소나무], 2016). In 1989, he finalized his dissertation, “Marx and Engels on the National Question” (), which investigates nationalist issues in light of Marxist thought.Jie-Hyun Lim, Marx and Engels on the National Question [Marx-Engels와 민족문제] (Seoul: Tamgudang [탐구당], 1990), 3–4.
Career In 1989, Lim became an associate professor at Hanyang University, Seoul, and later served as the chair of the history department from 1997 to 1999.
Meanwhile, Lim was a visiting professor at the Pedagogical University of Cracow in the 1990s. In this post-communist Poland, he witnessed the Polish transition from real socialism to a market economy and democracy, regarded by the Polish people as “a stubborn rightist” because of his Luxembourgian Marxism. Compared with Lim's twenties in postcolonial South Korea, where he imagined Korea's transition to socialism and looked at the rapid economic growth of Korea as “an angry young leftist,” his stay in Poland was the opposite experience. Lim acknowledges that such contrasting observations on the edges of East Asia and Eastern Europe have been valuable assets in exploring the periphery of global history:Jie-Hyun Lim, Doing History [역사를 어떻게 할 것인가: 어느 사학자의 에고 히스토리] (Seoul: Sonamoo Publishing [소나무], 2016), 30. it allowed him “to escape the intellectual complacency, be it leftist or rightist, of Cold War politics.”
From 2004 to 2015, Lim was the founding director of the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture at Hanyang University.
In March 2015, Lim became a professor of Transnational History at Sogang University,"History," History Department at Sogang University, n.d.https://ehistory.sogang.ac.kr/ehistory/ehistory01_2.html and the same year, he founded the Critical Global Studies Institute.Jie-Hyun Lim, "Director's Greetings," n.d. http://www.cgsi.ac/eng/sub/sub01_01.php?ptype=eng_sub01_01
Other career milestones of Lim include being a visiting scholar at Harvard Yenching Institute (2002⎼2003),"Lim Jie-Hyun," Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2002. https://www.harvard-yenching.org/person/lim-jie-hyun/ International Research Center for Japanese Studies (2009⎼2010),"Lim Jie Hyun," Japanese Studies Information Network, n.d. https://sekai.nichibun.ac.jp/researcher/edit/23617 EHESS (2010),"History - Faculty: Jie-Hyun Lim," Sogang University, n.d. https://ehistory.sogang.ac.kr/ehistory/ehistory02_1_7.html Paris II University (2014), Bielefeld University (2017), National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (2017),"Visiting Scholar: Jie-Hyun LIM," International Institute for Cultural Studies - 文化研究國際中心, 2017. https://iics.nycu.edu.tw/en/cooperation/visitingscholar/Jie-Hyun-Lim-68178206 Hitotsubashi University (2018),"[I-House Lecture] Victimhood Nationalism versus Mnemonic Solidarity: History Reconciliation in East Asia," International House of Japan, 3 July 2018. https://www.i-house.or.jp/eng/programs/i-house-lecture20180703/ Paris X University (2019), GWZO (2019),"Guest: Prof. Dr. Jie-Hyun Lim," GWZO, 2022. https://www.leibniz-gwzo.de/en/research/gaste-und-stipendienprogramm/jie-hyun-lim and Columbia University (2020);"Critical Global Studies: What, Why, and How: An informal conversation with graduate students in East Asian, European, and transnational history with Professor Jie-hyun Lim," Department of East Asian Languages & Culture at Columbia University, 30 January 2020.
http://ealac.columbia.edu/event/critical-global-studies-what-why-and-how-an-informal-conversation-with-graduate-students-in-east-asian-european-and-transnational-history-with-professor-jie-hyun-lim/ external professor at the University of Glamorgan (2002⎼2003);"Public Lecture: Hereditary victimhood and the post-colonial historiography in Korea," UCLA International Institute, 2003. https://international.ucla.edu/institute/event/709 research fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg (2011⎼2012)."Jie-Hyun Lim, Ph.D," Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2011. https://www.wiko-berlin.de/fellows/akademisches-jahr/2011/lim-jie-hyun
Work
Transnationalism