The Department of Transnational Asian Studies faculty member, Sonia Ryang, was recently announced as the 2023 recipient of The Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley's Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies for her academic monograph, Language and Truth in North Korea (University of Hawai'i Press, 2021). Inaugurated in 2022 to honor the late Professor Hong Yung Lee, the Award is given each year to the author(s) whose nonfiction English-language academic monograph demonstrates outstanding scholarly merit, research prowess, and methodological innovation.
In describing the innovation of Ryang's work, The Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley states that "Sonia Ryang offers new ways to think about North Korea and how truth emerges over decades from within a dominant discourse...The Kim Il Sung era, from 1945 to Kim’s death in 1994, forms the basis of the book, but the way truth emerged and was sustained during these decades provide important insight into how we can comprehend North Korea today. Rather than view the country as an ideological entity in order to expose its falsehood, so to speak, thinking critically about what it sees as true yields a far more productive outcome for scholarly analysis as well as general understanding. Language and Truth in North Korea will find a ready audience among those interested in North Korea from a wide variety of disciplines, including the social sciences, history, philosophy, and theology."