Educational Goals

• Folklore is the study of the old customs of the people who lived on the Korean Peninsula, examining these customs from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. For this purpose, the major adopts a historical approach to the interpreting customs that persist in the present Korean society, and also emphasizes the need to study customs that have disappeared but had important cultural significance in the past time and space. Therefore, students must learn to maintain critical and analytic perspective on Korean folklore, obtain the skills to write and analyze ethnographical works based on local field work, and hold a comparative perspective under an East Asian framework, etc. To this end, the curriculum of the major has the primary goal of cultivating the skills to independently establish the researchers’ own theory and methodology, while educating students to have the skills to comprehend relevant literature, and cultivating the competency of professional scholars to identify the cultural universality and specificity of customs that have historically existed or persisted in various regions of the Korean Peninsula and East Asia. Through this, it aims at training professional scholars needed in both society and academia.

Educational Focus

• Train students to have a holistic understanding of the objectives and scopes of Folklore Studies.
• Familiarize students with Folklore Studies’ theory and methodology to conduct specialized research on the specific topics.
• Understand the domestic and international research trends of Folklore and critically utilize research outputs.
• Build forward-looking academic insight through field work, historical folklore and comparative approaches.
• Train professional folklore studies scholars needed in both society and academia.