Javier Cha

I am a Canadian medievalist and digital historian based in Seoul. My first name is a tribute to my childhood in Buenos Aires, of which I have many fond memories. Prior to my move to South Korea in 2017, I have called Vancouver, Boston, Hong Kong, and the Hague my home.

I currently work as Associate Professor of East Asian Studies in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. I received my academic training at the BA and MA levels in Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia and PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.

At the moment, I am writing two monographs based on the PhD research. The first one argues for the medieval origins of a Korean collective identity and the role that post-Tang Confucianism played in that process. Some early thoughts on this topic is articulated in my guest editor’s introduction to the June 2019 issue of Seoul Journal of Korean Studies.

The second book is a longitudinal study of the various figures and clans involved in Korea’s medieval identity formation and Confucian transformation. To facilitate this research, I am building a Neo4j graph database that interlinks hundreds of thousands of records drawn from South Korea’s impressive collection of digitized historical databases.