Research Articles for the Routledge Handbook of Korean Religions

Call for Proposals

Editors: Sean Kim and Liora Sarfati

Scholarship on Korea has recently proliferated, in part influenced by South Korea’s economic rise and the popularity of K-pop. The study of Korean religions has been part of this trend, but there is currently no comprehensive reference for the rich and diverse Korean spiritual landscape. The Routledge Handbook on Korean Religions would fill that lacuna.

Korea has been a unique place for the development of religions. It has been pluralistic in the attitudes toward the vernacular worshippers and the elites, even when some religious practices had been persecuted or removed from the centralized mechanisms of the state. As a consequence, throughout the history of Korea’s religious sphere the indigenous religious beliefs and practices co-existed and sometimes syncretized with imported ideas and doctrines.

Recommended Topics

We are soliciting research articles for The Routledge Handbook on Korean Religions, in which each religious trend will be addressed through innovative research in disciplines, including history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, media studies, and religious studies. The articles can focus on pre-modern, modern, or contemporary religious phenomena related to vernacular religions (ancestor worship, pilgrimage, divination, shamanism), Buddhism, Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism, Christianity, new religions, and civil religions. Possible angles for discussion include the history of religious groups, sacred and important sites, influential religious texts, central religious leaders, transformations, debates, and specific practices.

The proposals cannot include work published elsewhere or similar to previous publications. We encourage scholars in all stages of their academic path to submit a proposal, as long as it includes new data and firmly structured analysis.

Submission Information

Proposals for chapters, including a short and a long abstract (200 and 1,000 words) will be accepted for initial consideration on a rolling basis from now until March 30, 2024.   Proposals should be sent to ckim@ucmo.edu and lsarfati@tauex.tau.ac.il . The full papers (7,000-8,000 words including references and bibliography) must be submitted by August 30 2024, and will undergo anonymous peer-review. Please consult the Routledge website for publishing guidelines: https://www.routledge.com/our-customers/authors/publishing-guidelines

The editors hope to conduct a workshop for the chapter contributors in the summer of 2024, pending funding. In this workshop, the contributors will learn about each other’s work in order to create links and cross references between the handbook’s chapters through discussion and reflections.

For further inquiries, please contact us, Sean Kim, Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri ckim@ucmo.edu, and Liora Sarfati, senior lecturer and the chair of the East Asian Studies department at Tel Aviv University lsarfati@tauex.tau.ac.il.

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