Research Areas

Military Science and Technology, Science and Imperialism, Language Revolution in East Asia, Modernization in East Asia.

Sungkeen Kim majored in Chemical Engineering at Jeonnam National University in South Korea. He then went to Japan to study the history of science and philosophy after he became interested in the subject when he began paying close attention to the democratization movements in South Korea during the 1980s. Since then he has become interested in how truth is created by the powerful desires of academic societies, media, political groups, etc. His more recent interest has focused specifically on the transition of knowledge from Neo-Confucianism to modern western science in 19th-century East Asia. It was the main subject of his Ph.D. dissertation that he completed at the University of Tokyo in 2004.

After his Ph.D. studies, he had a chance to study history of science at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England. He is now researching military technology of 19th-century East Asia to understand the social background of the rapid replacement of Neo-Confucianism by modern Western science.