Current Projects:
Core member of the Academy of Korean Studies funded project “Research and Teaching Hub for K-Wave Korean Studies in Europe”
Partner member providing research support for the project “Oxford and the Department for Education: working together to improve Modern Foreign Language education across England through a case study of Korean” funded by the Oxford Policy Engagement Network
Courses Taught:
Research Methods for Contemporary Korean Studies (postgraduate)
Prescribed Texts in Korean Studies (undergraduate and postgraduate)
Biography:
Simon currently holds dual roles in the Faculty as AKS Postdoctoral Research Fellow, since 2021, and Departmental Lecturer in Korean Studies, since 2022.
He studied Germanic and Slavonic Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge before transitioning to Korean Studies at SOAS, University of London, where he completed his postgraduate studies with the doctoral thesis Central Asian and Yanbian Korean in Comparative Perspective. His work to date has largely focused on linguistic variation in Korean, drawing upon diverse interdisciplinary perspectives and methods. This has ranged from fieldwork for language documentation, working with Korean communities in Central Asia and China’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, to conducting quantitative analysis of South Korean language atlases and, most recently, exploring the social meaning of linguistic variation in the online English-speaking communities of practice that have formed around the Korean Wave.
Alongside teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level, he has designed and delivered classes that promote language learning in schools and access to university for students with backgrounds that are under-represented in higher education for Oxplore and Uniq. He is corresponding editor of the journal Hallyu: The Korean Wave.
Research Interests:
- Diverse approaches to linguistic variation in Korean including:
- Traditional dialectology
- Quantitative dialectology / dialectometry
- Perceptual dialectology
- Social (meta)cognition of language variation
- Aesthetic testimony and language regard
- Digital Humanities in East Asian Studies informed by:
- Texts Analytics
- Network Analysis
- Data Visualisation
- Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Analysis
- Cultural globalisation, especially with relation to the Korean Wave
- Korean language pedagogy
Links:
The constituent reports of the Digital Humanities sub-project “Visualising the Korean Wave”, conducted as part of the larger program “Research and Teaching Hub for K-Wave Korean Studies in Europe”, can be found here.
