Martina Deuchler (born 1935 in Zurich) is a Swiss academic and author.[1] She was a professor of Korean studies at the SOAS University of London from 1991 to 2001.
Martina Deuchler developed her interest in Korea by way of Chinese and Japanese studies. She was educated in Leiden, Harvard and Oxford, at a time when Korea was still hardly known in the West. As one of the first Western scholars, Martina Deuchler studied Korean history and published a number of key works: Confucian Gentlemen and Barbarian Envoys (1977), The Confucian Transformation of Korea (1992), and Under the Ancestors' Eyes (2015). With her original scholarly work, combining history with social anthropology, Martina Deuchler created a framework for exploring Korean social history, within which she continues to research landed elites and their perception of the historic changes in East Asia at the end of the nineteenth century. As Korean studies emerged as an academic field in the second half of the twentieth century, Martina Deuchler, generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, contributed to the networking among Korea specialists isolated in a few European universities and was one of the founding members of the Association for Korean Studies in Europe (AKSE) in 1977. She participated in numerous scholarly workshops and conferences a few of which she herself organized. As Professor of Korean Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 1988 to her retirement in 2000, she dedicated herself to educating future generations of Koreanists and advancing Korean Studies as an academic field. She continues to be active as researcher and consultant.
Martina Deuchler studied classical and modern Chinese language and history as well as classical and modern Japanese language and literature at Leiden University, NL, from 1954 to 1959. She received her B.A. in Chinese and Japanese with honors in 1957. From 1959 to 1963 she continued her studies of modern history of China and Japan as a scholarship student in the Regional Area Program in East Asia of Harvard University. Her advisers were Prof. John K. Fairbank and Prof. Edwin O. Reischauer. She received a PhD in History and Far Eastern Languages with a dissertation entitled "The Opening of Korea, 1875–1884" in 1967. Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, she studied social anthropology with Prof. Maurice Freedman at Oxford University in 1972. In October 1979 she presented a second dissertation (Habilitation) with the title "Confucianism and the Social Structure of Early Yi Korea" to the University of Zurich and was awarded the Venia legendi for Classical Sinology and Korean Studies.
| 1967–1969 | Research in Korea as research fellow in East Asian studies, Harvard University | |
| 1973–1975 | Research in Korea as part of the SNSF project „History of Korea" | |
| 1978–1988 | Elected member of the Board of the Swiss Society of Asian Studies (Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Asienkunde) | |
| 1983–1986 | Member of the Committee on Korean Studies (CKS) of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), Ann Arbor, Michigan | |
| 1983–1988 | President of the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Asienkunde | |
| 1975–1988 | Teaching Korean history and language, University of Zurich | |
| 1980–1983 | Member of the Joint Committee on Korean Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies (SSRC/ACLS) | |
| 1987–1988 | Elected member of the Research Council of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, Berne | |
| 1988–1991 | Senior Lecturer for Korean Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London | |
| 1989–1998 | Chair of the Centre for Korean Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) | |
| 1991–1993 | President of the Association for Korean Studies in Europe (AKSE) | |
| 1991–2001 | Professor of Korean Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London | |
| 2000 | Member of the Visiting Committee on East Asian Studies (Board of Overseers of Harvard College), Harvard University. Responsible for the Korea program | |
| 2001 | Visiting Professor of Korean History at Cornell University | |
| 2002–2005 | Member of the International Advisory Committee of the Korea Foundation | |
| 2004 | Member of the Visiting Committee on East Asian Studies (Board of Overseers of Harvard College), Harvard University. Responsible for the Korea program | |
| 2004 | Visiting Professor, Academy of Korean Studies, Seoul | |
| 2006 | Member of the Visitatie Commissie Niet–Westerse Talen en Culturen, Leiden University; responsible for the Korea program | |
| 2002–2014 | Research Professor, Centre for Korean Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS, London | |
| 2008–2009 | Visiting Professor of Korean History at Sŏgang University, Seoul |
Martina Deuchler has conducted intensive research in Korea for over fifty years. Due to the fact that in the 1960s there were few historical sources on Korea in Western libraries, she went to Korea to study in the former royal library (Kyujanggak) from 1967 to 1969. The result of this two-year stay was the publication of Confucian Gentlemen and Barbarian Envoys (1977), a history of Korea's diplomatic opening by Japan and the Western powers at the end of the nineteenth century.
At that time, Martina Deuchler also conducted fieldwork on Confucian ritualism, especially ancestor worship. Thanks to her affinal relations through her husband, Dr. Ching Young Choe, she was granted unique access to social and religious traditions and ceremonies, rarely witnessed by Westerners, in a remote rural area in North Gyeongsang Province. She documented her observations in numerous color slides. In 1972 she moved to Oxford University to study social anthropology with Maurice Freedman. During a second sojourn from 1973 to 1975 she expanded her knowledge of Korea's social history with archival and field research. This resulted in a major, highly acclaimed work, The Confucian Transformation of Korea (1992). This book, translated into Korean and partly into Japanese, focuses on the influence Chinese Neo-Confucianism exercised on Korean society of the Joseon period (1392–1910). It documents the stages by which Neo-Confucianism, as a socio-political ideology, transformed the originally bilateral Korean society into a patrilineal one.
After many more years of research on social and intellectual history, in particular Korean Neo-Confucianism, and sustained dialogue with Korean scholars, she published Under the Ancestors' Eyes in 2015. This work argues that Korean elite society was structured on the basis of descent groups throughout its long history, and actually up to this day. In premodern Korea, therefore, it was social origin (i.e., birth and descent) rather than political office that served to identify elite status. The research materials of Martina Deuchler are since 2017 preserved in the Ethnographic Museum of University of Zurich.
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Martina Deuchler, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 18 works in 56 publications in 4 languages and 1,694 library holdings.[2]
| 1993 | Wiam Chang Chi-yŏn Memorial Award for Korean Studies | |
| 1995 | Reischauer Memorial Lectures at Harvard University | |
| 1995 | Order of Cultural Merit (Eun-Gwan, Silver Crown), Republic of Korea | |
| 2001 | George L. Paik Scholarship Award (Yongjae haksulsang) der Yonsei University, Institute of Korean Studies, Seoul | |
| 2001 | Citation of Appreciation for "outstanding contribution to the development of Korean Studies in the World" from Korea Foundation, Seoul | |
| 2006 | Elected Corresponding Fellow (H3) of the British Academy, FBA. | |
| 2008 | Honorary Member of the British Association of Korean Studies (BAKS) | |
| 2008 | First Korea Foundation Award for Contributions to Korean Studies | |
| 2009 | Association for Asian Studies (AAS), Lifetime Achievement Award, 2009.[3] | |
| 2011 | Honorary Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, Seoul | |
| 2018 | Award Honorary degree by the Faculty of Humanities, University of Zurich |