Jessica Morgan-Brown

Jessica Morgan-Brown is a Korean Studies scholar focused on the use of language in literature to drive nationalist movements during the Japanese Colonial period on the Korean Peninsula. She is particularly interested in the vernacularization movements that contributed to Korea’s orthographic shift from using predominantly Sino-Korean characters to the Korean orthography hangeul. She uses the language and literature of various literary coterie magazines from the 1910s and 1920s to analyze the ways in which language mimics contemporaneous shifts in society as well as how it is used experimentally in the creation of a new nation-defining Korean literature. In her previous degrees, she has also researched (and maintains a current interest in) North/South Korean language variation and change, specifically divergent phonological shifts that can be detected through diachronic audio analysis of film dialogue.

Presentations 

• “Literacy Campaigns, Media, and Gender in Post-Liberation Korea.” Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference 2023. Boston, MA, USA, March 2023.
• “A Diachronic Analysis of North and South Korean Monophthongs: Modern Vowel Shifts on the Korean Peninsula.” 19th International Circle of Korean Linguists ICKL) and 16th Harvard International Symposium on Korean Linguistics (Harvard-ISOKL) joint conference. University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA, July 2015.
• “Improving integration in UK migrant communities through translanguaging, culture-specific, ESL pedagogical models and the provision of a linguistic ‘safe space’”. Graduate Research Conference. St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, May 2016.
• “Early Childhood English Education in South Korea: Problems and Prospectus.” 2nd International Conference on Young Language Learners (YLL). University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, July 2016. [co-author Jieun Kiaer]

Publications

• Kiaer, Jieun, Jessica Morgan-Brown, and Naya Choi. Young Children’s Foreign Language Anxiety: South Korea in Focus. Multilingual Matters: Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching. (Multilingual Matters: 2021)
• Choi, Naya, Taeyeon Kim, Jieun Kiaer, & Jessica Morgan-Brown. "Mothers’ Educational Beliefs and Preschoolers’ English Learning Attitudes: The Mediating Role of English Experiences at Home." SAGE Open 10, no. 4 (2020): 2158244020970231.