Young-Key Kim-Renaud

Dr. Young-Key Kim-Renaud is Professor Emeritus of Korean Language and Culture and International Affairs, and Senior Advisor to the Institute for Korean Studies, at George Washington University, where she taught for 32 years and served as Chair of the East Asian Languages and Literatures Department for the last 12 years of her tenure before retiring in 2015. She is the founder and convener of the Hahn Moo-Sook Colloquium in the Korean Humanities series at GW. While at GW, she was invited to teach at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and at the School of Foreign Studies at Nanjing University, China. Before joining GW, she was a Linguistics Program Director at the U.S. National Science Foundation. As a pioneer in Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language and in Korean Linguistics, she began to teach Korean at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. Her publications on Korean linguistics and Korean humanities include 13 books. She is past President of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics (1990-92) and former Editor-in-Chief of its journal, Korean Linguistics (2002-14).

Dr. Kim-Renaud has organized major academic and cultural events concerned with Korean studies. She has received major research awards and grants, including three Fulbright awards, twice for Korea and once for Jordan. She has won individual research grants from the Korea Foundation, the Korea Research Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, the Academy of Korean Studies, and the ROK Arts and Culture Foundation. She has received program and institutional grants for GW from the Korea Foundation, the Korea Research Foundation, as well as the ROK Ministries of Education, of Information, and of Culture. She has also won support for GW's Korean program from the Consortium of Universities of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area, among others.

Keen on philanthropy, Dr. Kim-Renaud helped raise six endowment funds in Korean studies at GW, the most recent one to create a faculty position in Korean literature/humanities. She has received prestigious prizes including three Fulbright awards, the Republic of Korea Order of Cultural Merit, and the Samsung Bichumi Award (Women of the Year) in Korea.

Dr. Kim-Renaud received a B.A. in English from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea; an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley; a graduate degree in French from Sorbonne, University of Paris; and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Hawai‘i. She also studied German at Heidelberg University, Spanish at the University of Madrid, and Chinese at Nanjing University.