In Memory of Nancy Abelmann

We would like to dedicate this issue to the memory of Journal of Korean Studies board member Nancy Abelmann, who died January 6, 2016, at age fifty-seven. At her death Nancy was Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and the Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was a shooting star who burned brightly in the Korean studies field, which is now a little darker due to her passing.

With The Journal of Korean Studies Nancy was an author, of course, and a good referee of manuscripts, who used her wide circle of scholarly acquaintances to find us reviewers when she couldn’t do it herself. She guest edited, with Jesook Song, Volume 17, Number 2 (Fall 2012) “Korea through Ethnography.” More than that, however, she mentored students who, in turn, became authors who have published in the journal.

Fitting for an issue dedicated to Nancy, we have a wide variety of articles covering issues of gender and sexuality: the affective weight of mothers-in-law, new social statuses for female shamans, women in ethnocultural peril depicted in cinema, and the politics of the body in seventeenth-century Korean love tales. We also have two articles on development and space in early modern Seoul. In addition this issue has a couple of unique features: an interview with a North Korean writer and two review essays, one on recent books on North Korea, and the other giving the views of Chinese scholars writing on contemporary Sino–South Korean relations.