Description: This book is a study of how human-animal relations became increasingly significant to politics, national security, and elite identities during the transitional period in late Koryŏ and early Chosŏn dynasty Korea from the 1270s until 1506.
Brief description: George Kallander is Professor of History at Syracuse University, where he is also Director of the East Asia Program at the Moynihan Institute. He is author of The Diary of 1636: The Second Manchu Invasion of Korea (Columbia University Press, 2020) and Salvation through Dissent: Tonghak Heterodoxy and Early Modern Korea (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013). Kallander has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Academy of Korean Studies, and Columbia University.
Review Quotes: [A] formidable contribution to the young but growing fields of Korean animal studies and environmental history [...] Kallander's account offers compelling insights to many different kinds of readers, from those interested in Korea's environmental history and the fate of its [...] wild animals, to scholars interested in further evidence of Mongol legacies in premodern Korea or the politics and ideology of the Koryŏ- Chosŏn transition. Such a rich and thoroughly accessible volume shows the exciting possibilities that come from examining Korean history through a multispecies lens.--Joseph Seeley, University of Virginia "Journal of Korean Studies"