Edward W. Wagner

 

Edward Willett Wagner was the pioneer scholar of Korean history in the United States, and he spent most of his life at Harvard University where he trained the next generations of students in Korean history. Harvard was the first American university to establish a Korean history program, and Wagner’s long career paralleled the development of Korean studies in the U.S.

Edward W. Wagner was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924 and admitted to Harvard University in 1941 at the age of seventeen. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943 and served as a civilian adviser in charge of foreign affairs to the U.S. military government in Korea from 1946 to 1948. It was at that time that he became interested in Korea. Upon returning to Harvard University, he finished his undergraduate studies in 1949 and moved on to receive an A.M. in Regional Studies.East Asia in 1951. In the same year, his work based on his experiences in Korea and Japan was published under the title of  The Korean Minority in Japan. It was the first academic study on Koreans living in Japan.

As a Ph.D. student in Korean history at Harvard University, he studied under Professor Takahashi Toru at Tenri University, Japan, from 1953 to 1955. He spent the next three years in Korea for dissertation research. He received his doctorate with a dissertation entitled The Literati Purges: Case Studies in the Factionalism of the Early Yi Dynasty, published by the East Asian Research Center at Harvard University as The Literati Purges: Political Conflict in Early Yi Korea in 1974. He started to teach Korean history at Harvard in 1958, was appointed assistant professor in 1959, and eventually advanced to full professor. In 1981, he became the first director of the Korea Institute. Wagner devoted his entire life to the development of Korean studies at Harvard University. He also helped to enlarge the Korea collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library.

One of Wagner’s major works is the English translation of Han’guksa sillon (A New History of Korea) by Lee Ki-baik, which became a widely-used Korean history textbook (Wagner 1984). By translating Lee’s acclaimed book, Professor Wagner gave the Western student a readable and systematic introduction to Korean history. Indeed, the English edition became the standard for a series of further translation projects in Korean studies

Although Wagner paved the way for Korean historians to share their academic works with Western scholars, he pursued his own scholarly course. His approach to Korean history was not only original, but also supported by sound research based on primary sources. His studies focused on the Joseon (or Choseon) period (1392-1910), and with painstaking labor, he established a vast database of some 100,000 men who belonged to the Joseon upper class. His database is based on the records of some 14,600 men known to have passed the civil service examination (mungwa or munkwa) and who composed the core of the Joseon ruling elite. In the lengthy collaboration with Song June-ho (formerly of Chonbuk National University), he developed what has become known as the “Wagner-Song Munkwa Project.” This vast undertaking greatly contributed to new approaches in historical scholarship that differed significantly from research directions in Korea. Wagner also took a comparative perspective and attempted to identify the unique characteristics of the Joseon dynasty elite in contrast to that of China and Japan, thus giving his arguments broader appeal and applicability.