Honors Theses
Date of Award
Spring 5-9-2026
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Croft Institute for International Studies
First Advisor
Bridget Martin
Second Advisor
Kariann Fuqua
Relational Format
Undergraduate Thesis
Abstract
How and why does Park Chung Hee remain so potent in the minds of South Koreans, decades after his rule? Seungsook Moon (2009) describes the phenomenon as Park Chung Hee Syndrome: a cultural condition in which Park’s image circulates between glorification, demonization, and humanization, producing an unresolved and emotionally charged field of memory. Building on this, researchers have examined how a type of “Park Chung Hee nostalgia” operates through selective remembrance of developmental success, moral discipline, and national unity, ultimately creating a positive memory and longing for semblance of his long-ended rule (Park, 2011; Podoler, 2016; Lee, 2022).
Statues and museums are physical structures by which we can witness such abstract phenomena. While material sites are known to offer reflections of public feeling, they also reorganize these tense and complicated relations into consumable memory, objects and spaces that can be visited, photographed, circulated, and inherited. Among them, the Park Chung Hee Presidential Museum (PCHPM) in Seoul stands as one of the most comprehensive and institutionally authoritative efforts to curate Park’s legacy, offering a nostalgic viewpoint of his reign.
Through an analysis of this museum, I reimagine Park Chung Hee nostalgia not simply as an abstract, pre-existing sentiment but as a curated outcome. While scholars have debated Park’s contested legacy and traced the persistence of this nostalgia as an ideological or emotional factor, comparatively little work has been done to address how nostalgia is produced internally, through which specific mechanisms a past becomes so desirable in the present. Through an analysis of the PCHPM, I reveal the strategies of language, sequencing, silences, and more that have allowed for these distant pasts to remain emotionally resonant in contemporary South Korea
Recommended Citation
Shaw, Abigail, "Selective Remembrance: Constructing Nostalgia at the Park Chung Hee Presidential Museum" (2026). Honors Theses. 3539.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/3539
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