Q: I am currently in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and we are doing a Zoom interview with Jeongeun Park, the new Associate Director of Rutgers Oral History Archives. Jeongeun, can you please introduce yourself briefly and say where you are now?
A: I am currently in San Francisco, California, waiting for my connecting flight to Newark Airport. Let’s see, my name is Jeongeun Park, pronounced “Jŏng-ŭn Pak.” I started a couple of weeks ago, on September 30, as the Associate Director of Rutgers Oral History Archives after receiving my Master of Arts in History from Rutgers-New Brunswick in May 2024.
Q: Oh wow, so you are working at your alma mater. What did you study during your time as a graduate student?
A: I studied the history of the Cold War in Northeast Asia. I feel most comfortable talking about 20th-century East Asian history and modern world history more broadly. I began as a PhD student in History in 2020, wanting to study information exchange within the communist bloc—specifically between North Korea and the Soviet Union.
Thanks to wonderful advisors and mentors—a shoutout to Dr. Suzy Kim (Asian Languages and Cultures, Rutgers-NB) and Dr. Jochen Hellbeck (History, Rutgers-NB), first and foremost—I learned so much from my time as a graduate student. I also consider myself lucky as I became good friends with many of my graduate student colleagues in the History department. But I realized during graduate school that I mistook my admiration for the historian’s craft as a desire to become an academic historian.
A scholar of history must prioritize their time in the archives, deeply engaging with the sources to reconstruct the past and craft the best possible narrative of what happened. I found out that I enjoy reading history after my colleagues do the hard work of making sense of the bits of evidence scattered throughout the archives (laughs).
What I love is being a community builder—a public historian. I am at my best when I share with the world how cool history is and how much it impacts us daily. Once I realized that, I wanted to become a practitioner as soon as possible. So, after tying up some loose ends in my doctorate coursework, I received my Master of Arts in History in May 2024.
Q: That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like Rutgers Oral History Archives offers you such an opportunity, but could you please tell me a little more about what it is and what it does?
A: So, Rutgers Oral History Archives, or ROHA as we call it, documents the life experiences of New Jersey residents and/or Rutgers University faculty, staff, and alumni through its own interviews and in partnership with individuals and initiatives within the State and University communities carrying out similar work. We make the resulting collection available to the benefit of scholars, students and others worldwide through our digital online archive.
ROHA has an interesting history of its own. It began as a collaboration between the Rutgers College Class of 1942 and the History Department to document the alumni's life experiences—first- and second-generation immigrant upbringings, the Great Depression, World War II, and beyond. ROHA soon opened its doors to all affiliated with Rutgers University, then, to all New Jersey residents as part of ROHA's service to the public of New Jersey. The interview tracks developed then—Rutgers history, NJ History, and veterans' stories—continue to form key parts of ROHA's long-term mission.
The ROHA staff has since significantly augmented its collections pertaining to understudied, underserved groups—African-American, Latina/o, LGBTQ+, women, and others—within the Rutgers, New Jersey, and veteran populations. ROHA has also launched partnership initiatives to document new populations and events, most notably the COVID-19 Pandemic and its impact on NJ.
Q: Huh, I did not know that Rutgers was home to such a cool archive! What will your own work at ROHA include? How did your education before and at Rutgers help you prepare for this role?
A: Now, we are essentially a two-person center buoyed by our wonderful Community Liaison Committee volunteers at the helm of Rutgers Living History Society, our undergraduate interns, and our academic advisory board. What that means for our day-to-day operations is that the Director and the Associate Director do almost everything together all at once. I support Shaun Illingworth, the Director of ROHA, in doing new oral history interviews, archiving the interviews after transcribing and editing, maintaining and renovating the digital archives at https://oralhistory.rutgers.edu, expanding our outreach efforts through our website, social media, podcast, and virtual exhibitions, organizing community events, and so on and so forth. So far, I love the variety of work and the way it is so closely tied to the communities we serve at Rutgers. It probably is also that Shaun has been very mindful to introduce me slowly to our tasks one at a time so that I am not overwhelmed (laughs).
I feel prepared to tackle the range of work, though. At Rutgers, I received the finest education and pursued my own research on the history of the 20th century. My own angle was global and comparative, but I learned from my professors, colleagues, and friends that so much of modern history at the local, state, and national levels is intimately connected to regional and global history and vice versa. Moreover, in explaining how and why the history of the corner of the world and snippet of time I study—North Korea in the early- to mid-20th-century—is important to broader history, I got a lot of practice in engaging non-specialist audiences on different historical topics. As a co-founder of a graduate student working group supported by Global Asias: A School of Arts and Sciences Humanities Dean Funded Initiative, I also helped put together a lot of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary events. I am eager to deepen the collaboration between ROHA and the History departments across Rutgers campuses and build partnerships with interdisciplinary programs that invoke oral histories such as American Studies; Asian Languages and Cultures; Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and more.
I received my Bachelor of Arts in History with minors in Digital Humanities and Modern Languages at Stanford University. It is neat to be at ROHA, one of the first digital oral history archives. I am super excited to bring in more elements of digital humanities, such as historical mapping, geospatial analysis, and quantitative text analysis, to showcase our collection's strengths. We at ROHA are also very mindful of accessible and inclusive design for our website as we want to welcome more interviewees and a diverse user base. Shaun, I, and the SAS IT web development team are also hard at work on that front.
Q: That sounds amazing. I checked out the ROHA website and it already looks very interesting, so I am stoked to see the next iteration. One last question before we leave—what unique experiences do you bring to this role? Anything else on your mind?
A: I am actually thinking about my late grandfather right now. May he rest in peace. I am in San Francisco right now because I am traveling back from Korea after attending his funeral. Especially now that I have this position at Rutgers Oral History Archives, I realize there were so many questions I could have asked him and so many stories I could have heard from him.
To some degree, I started studying history to understand my grandparents a little better. I did not get why they were a certain way politically and culturally. In my callow eyes, he was so duty-bound, so conservative, and so parochial. And since I received an international education and studied abroad, there was also a linguistic barrier of some sort. Don’t get me wrong, my everyday Korean is perfectly fine. But I am out of practice when it comes to presenting myself professionally and academically in polished Korean. My grandfather also had the thickest Southeastern Korean accent, so my mom often had to “interpret” between us. I thought perhaps I could understand them better if I studied 20th-century Korean history.
In studying modern history, I realized that while I can see the appeal of communism in postcolonial Korea right after liberation as an anti-imperial ideology—make no mistake, I am talking about the idea, not the failed state that is North Korea—my grandfather recalled the days of living in mountains in fear to avoid being drafted by the “commies.” And while I can sometimes be critical of how the U.S. tolerated and enabled (developmental) authoritarianism in Asia and Latin America while professing to be the beacon of democracy during the Cold War—my grandfather thought of that same period as a vibrant time when roads were paved, his business boomed, and his kids went to college.
But these are all imagined conversations. I never asked him about how he experienced his life. How did he meet his wife? How did he feel when each of his children and his grandkids were born? Why did he feel obliged to take care of his family, his siblings, and even his siblings’ families to a degree beyond and above what many would have done? What inspired him to plant the beautiful camelia trees overlooking his parents’ tombs? What did the clothing store he opened and closed until the last year of his ninety years of life mean for him? How did it start and expand? I hear versions from my grandmother, mom, aunts, and uncles, but I lost my chance to hear my grandfather’s own take on his journey through life.
So I ask the readers to please reach out to Rutgers Oral History Archives to deposit your, your family members’, and your friends’ oral histories. Please tell us about your journey, wherever you are in life. What were events of personal significance to you? Which historical events impacted you the most? We want to know, and your families and friends want to hear. And generations of historians, researchers, teachers, students, and more will find takeaways from your story.
Q: Thank you, Jeongeun, for making the time to have this conversation.
A: Thank you for letting me share a little bit about myself and my own path to Rutgers Oral History Archives.
Interview on October 19, 2024
* Opinions expressed in the interview are solely Jeongeun Park's and hers alone and do not express the views or opinions of Rutgers Oral History Archives and/or Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
