Hyunhee Park offers the first global historical study of soju, the distinctive distilled drink of Korea. Searching for soju’s origins, Park leads us into the vast, complex world of premodern Eurasia. She demonstrates how the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wove together hemispheric flows of trade, empire, scientific and technological transfer and created the conditions for the development of a singularly Korean drink. Soju’s rise in Korea marked the evolution of a new material culture through ongoing interactions between the global and local and between tradition and innovation in the adaptation and localization of new technologies. Park’s vivid new history shows how these cross-cultural encounters laid the foundations for the creation of a globally connected world.
Hyunhee Park is a Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center. A native of South Korea, Prof. Park received her B.A. in Asian and Western history at Seoul National University, M.A. in East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ph.D. in history at Yale University.
Prof. Park specializes in the history of cross-cultural contacts in East Asia and the Islamic World, in Sino-Islamic contacts in particular, in the Mongol Empire, and global history, focusing on information/knowledge transfers, including transfers of geographical knowledge, foodways, and distillation technologies. She authored Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, Hardback 2012, Paperback 2015), Soju: A Global History (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and 30 articles for academic journals and edited volumes.
Serving as the coordinator of the Humanities and Justice Studies program (Fall 2016 –), Prof. Park has taught several cap-stone courses for the HJS major in addition to history courses including Chinese and Global History, Historiography, Research Methods, and Senior Seminars.
