Memory Scholarship:
FACULTY FEATURE WITH SUHI CHOI
KAYLEIGH SILVERSTEIN
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Suhi Choi, professor and associate chair of the Department of Communication, wanted to teach about how to communicate what we have lost. She introduced a new course called Grief Communication and continued to expand her area of memory studies from the perspectives of trauma, mourning, and empathy. “With both the finitude and precarity of our lives, we are all grappling with loss in varying contexts and we all have become mourners at some point,” said Choi. Choi sees herself as a memory scholar—she studies how we interact with the past. While it may sound like another way of studying history, it’s actually a method of understanding who we are now.
“What memory scholarship is exploring is not the past itself but our relationship with the past,” Choi said. “If we were paying attention to how we interact with the past, we would be able to learn a lot about who we are in the present, and who we’re becoming in the future.” She teaches memory scholarship by investigating how the past is mediated through different forms of media such as memorials, museums, statues, archival images, motion pictures, testimonies, and human bodies. “The act of remembering is not only social but also deeply personal,” she said. “At the moment you appreciate a memory text, your identity is activated, so it’s not like a text represents general meanings to you, but the text rather would mediate you to experience the past event so that you can identify your own specific meanings from it.”
WE ALL HAVE BECOME MOURNERS AT SOME POINT
Choi is the author of two books, “Right to Mourn: Trauma, Empathy, and Korean War Memorials” (Oxford University Press, 2019) and “Embattled Memories: Contested Meanings in Korean War Memorials” (the University of Nevada Press, 2014).
Throughout the journey of writing her books about traumatic memories of the Korean War, she noticed a lack of recognition of American Korean War Veterans’ trauma. Choi said this is because the Korean War has not been communicated well to Americans.
“Their experience is wrapped around with the heroic, triumphant and patriotic narrative,” she said. “In that narrative, it’s hard for them to communicate their own trauma.”
She is currently writing her third book tentatively titled “Phantoms of Memorial,” a critique of the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.
Choi grew up in South Korea and received her degree in Korean History at Korea University. She was a TV documentary writer for five years but wanted to further explore storytelling through documentary making. So, she moved to New York and signed up for an MFA program in TV production at Brooklyn College.
While learning media production, she was increasingly drawn to the aesthetics of media texts, and she later joined a doctorate program in Mass Media and Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia. She didn’t think she would stay in the United States, but then she ended up at the University of Utah.
Growing up in a small metropolis in South Korea, she felt like coming to Salt Lake was a fullcircle moment.
“Once you have a family and raise your children, it becomes your home,” she said.
PROMOTING GLOBAL EDUCATION
Choi has served as associate chair in the Department of Communication for the last two years. In this leadership platform, she made a special effort to promote global education, as she has always studied and taught in an international context.
“My most memorable teaching experience happened when I, as a Fulbright Specialist, taught a summer course at the University of Haifa in Israel,” she said.“I had both seven Jewish students and five Arab students in the same classroom. Taking the course subject as an allegory for ongoing conflicts in Israel, students on both sides vigorously and empathetically engaged in discussions about memory, conflict, and the roles of media.”
To help U students study in a global context, Choi launched an affordable communication summer study abroad program at the U’s campus in South Korea. The participating students took a total of seven credits of communication courses and visited DMZ, K-Pop production sites, and heritage places.
Choi said a large population of students at the U’s Asia Campus are communication majors and frequently come to the Salt Lake campus. But, it does not always go the other way. She is hoping this program will facilitate more traffic between the two campuses.
As another project promoting global education, Choi launched refugee engagement in the department.
“We live with refugees—they are our new neighbors, new Utahns and new Americans, but we don’t know them enough,” she said. “By interacting with them, our students can learn a lot about global culture, affairs, languages, and life experiences.”
Choi and Mike Middleton, the former director of the debate society and now associate dean in the College of Humanities, brought the U’s nationally recognized debate team to a refugee center to teach students debate skills, as they grow to become active citizens of a civic society.
When she spoke at a recruiting event, Choi wanted her words to resonate with the refugee parents. She told them, “I am raising my children in a country that I didn’t grow up in.”
To further facilitate refugee engagement, Choi and the graduate students of her memory class also recently hosted a refugee forum with local refugee panelists from Afghanistan, Uganda, and Sudan.
In the latest newsletter for the department, Choi noted, “Refugees are the taxonomists of human affairs. When they communicate their stories, refugees try to bring names, meanings, and orders to comprehend the incomprehensible. Like taxonomists, they thus run into a communicative quandary in that their words defy their impulse to portray human affairs as chaotic as they have experienced. Their struggle demands our attention.”
Sean Lawson, director of the Edna AndersonTaylor Communication Institute and associate professor in communication, first met Choi when he moved into her old office. They bonded because both of their areas of research stray from mainstream communication topics.
“Suhi has really been a leader and has been creative in her thinking about how we can come together, to work with this community, to learn from them, and to help this community in a way that sort of enriches all of us in the process,” Lawson said. “And so we’ve definitely seen that with the work that she has sort of spearheaded with the debate society.”
The department had been trying to do more community outreach, and central to the forum’s goal is hearing refugees tell their stories, in their own ways.
“The underlying idea around the forum was to have an opportunity to give voice to folks who are marginalized within our community and in a way that they can be seen and they can be heard by us and that hopefully we can learn from them,” Lawson said. Lawson hopes this event will eventually become a series.
SUHI CHOI
Professor, Associate Chair, Department of Communication
" If we were paying attention to how we interact with the past, we would be able to learn a lot about who we are in the present, and who we’re becoming in the future."
“A TOTAL CLASS ACT"
“From my perspective, Suhi has always been just a total class act, professional, always the voice of reason in our discussions in the department, and just always someone who I’ve really respected and looked up to,” Lawson said. Choi called campus her “intellectual playground,” saying teaching is a good opportunity to challenge herself. She said by being surrounded by young people, who bring new ideas, passions, and perspectives, “you never feel like you’re stagnant.” What is next? “I would love to continue facilitating global education at U. As a somewhat new journey, I also look for the opportunity to translate my trauma studies in a war context into a meaningful set of applications that would assist patients, caregivers, and providers to better cope with grief and loss in a medical context,” she said.
Memory Scholarship:
FACULTY FEATURE WITH SUHI CHOI
KAYLEIGH SILVERSTEIN
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Suhi Choi, professor and associate chair of the Department of Communication, wanted to teach about how to communicate what we have lost. She introduced a new course called Grief Communication and continued to expand her area of memory studies from the perspectives of trauma, mourning, and empathy. “With both the finitude and precarity of our lives, we are all grappling with loss in varying contexts and we all have become mourners at some point,” said Choi. Choi sees herself as a memory scholar—she studies how we interact with the past. While it may sound like another way of studying history, it’s actually a method of understanding who we are now.
“What memory scholarship is exploring is not the past itself but our relationship with the past,” Choi said. “If we were paying attention to how we interact with the past, we would be able to learn a lot about who we are in the present, and who we’re becoming in the future.” She teaches memory scholarship by investigating how the past is mediated through different forms of media such as memorials, museums, statues, archival images, motion pictures, testimonies, and human bodies. “The act of remembering is not only social but also deeply personal,” she said. “At the moment you appreciate a memory text, your identity is activated, so it’s not like a text represents general meanings to you, but the text rather would mediate you to experience the past event so that you can identify your own specific meanings from it.”
WE ALL HAVE BECOME MOURNERS AT SOME POINT
Choi is the author of two books, “Right to Mourn: Trauma, Empathy, and Korean War Memorials” (Oxford University Press, 2019) and “Embattled Memories: Contested Meanings in Korean War Memorials” (the University of Nevada Press, 2014).
Throughout the journey of writing her books about traumatic memories of the Korean War, she noticed a lack of recognition of American Korean War Veterans’ trauma. Choi said this is because the Korean War has not been communicated well to Americans.
“Their experience is wrapped around with the heroic, triumphant and patriotic narrative,” she said. “In that narrative, it’s hard for them to communicate their own trauma.”
She is currently writing her third book tentatively titled “Phantoms of Memorial,” a critique of the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.
Choi grew up in South Korea and received her degree in Korean History at Korea University. She was a TV documentary writer for five years but wanted to further explore storytelling through documentary making. So, she moved to New York and signed up for an MFA program in TV production at Brooklyn College.
While learning media production, she was increasingly drawn to the aesthetics of media texts, and she later joined a doctorate program in Mass Media and Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia. She didn’t think she would stay in the United States, but then she ended up at the University of Utah.
Growing up in a small metropolis in South Korea, she felt like coming to Salt Lake was a fullcircle moment.
“Once you have a family and raise your children, it becomes your home,” she said.
PROMOTING GLOBAL EDUCATION
Choi has served as associate chair in the Department of Communication for the last two years. In this leadership platform, she made a special effort to promote global education, as she has always studied and taught in an international context.
“My most memorable teaching experience happened when I, as a Fulbright Specialist, taught a summer course at the University of Haifa in Israel,” she said.“I had both seven Jewish students and five Arab students in the same classroom. Taking the course subject as an allegory for ongoing conflicts in Israel, students on both sides vigorously and empathetically engaged in discussions about memory, conflict, and the roles of media.”
To help U students study in a global context, Choi launched an affordable communication summer study abroad program at the U’s campus in South Korea. The participating students took a total of seven credits of communication courses and visited DMZ, K-Pop production sites, and heritage places.
Choi said a large population of students at the U’s Asia Campus are communication majors and frequently come to the Salt Lake campus. But, it does not always go the other way. She is hoping this program will facilitate more traffic between the two campuses.
As another project promoting global education, Choi launched refugee engagement in the department.
" If we were paying attention to how we interact with the past, we would be able to learn a lot about who we are in the present, and who we’re becoming in the future."
“We live with refugees—they are our new neighbors, new Utahns and new Americans, but we don’t know them enough,” she said. “By interacting with them, our students can learn a lot about global culture, affairs, languages, and life experiences.”
Choi and Mike Middleton, the former director of the debate society and now associate dean in the College of Humanities, brought the U’s nationally recognized debate team to a refugee center to teach students debate skills, as they grow to become active citizens of a civic society.
When she spoke at a recruiting event, Choi wanted her words to resonate with the refugee parents. She told them, “I am raising my children in a country that I didn’t grow up in.”
To further facilitate refugee engagement, Choi and the graduate students of her memory class also recently hosted a refugee forum with local refugee panelists from Afghanistan, Uganda, and Sudan.
SUHI CHOI
Professor, Associate Chair, Department of Communication
In the latest newsletter for the department, Choi noted, “Refugees are the taxonomists of human affairs. When they communicate their stories, refugees try to bring names, meanings, and orders to comprehend the incomprehensible. Like taxonomists, they thus run into a communicative quandary in that their words defy their impulse to portray human affairs as chaotic as they have experienced. Their struggle demands our attention.”
Sean Lawson, director of the Edna AndersonTaylor Communication Institute and associate professor in communication, first met Choi when he moved into her old office. They bonded because both of their areas of research stray from mainstream communication topics.
“Suhi has really been a leader and has been creative in her thinking about how we can come together, to work with this community, to learn from them, and to help this community in a way that sort of enriches all of us in the process,” Lawson said. “And so we’ve definitely seen that with the work that she has sort of spearheaded with the debate society.”
The department had been trying to do more community outreach, and central to the forum’s goal is hearing refugees tell their stories, in their own ways.
“The underlying idea around the forum was to have an opportunity to give voice to folks who are marginalized within our community and in a way that they can be seen and they can be heard by us and that hopefully we can learn from them,” Lawson said. Lawson hopes this event will eventually become a series.
“A TOTAL CLASS ACT"
“From my perspective, Suhi has always been just a total class act, professional, always the voice of reason in our discussions in the department, and just always someone who I’ve really respected and looked up to,” Lawson said. Choi called campus her “intellectual playground,” saying teaching is a good opportunity to challenge herself. She said by being surrounded by young people, who bring new ideas, passions, and perspectives, “you never feel like you’re stagnant.” What is next? “I would love to continue facilitating global education at U. As a somewhat new journey, I also look for the opportunity to translate my trauma studies in a war context into a meaningful set of applications that would assist patients, caregivers, and providers to better cope with grief and loss in a medical context,” she said.