Seonghek Kang
2025-2026
Marcel Bataillon
The Pennsylvania State University
The Textile Workers and Popular Religiosity in the Comuneros of Segovia
A native of South Korea, in 2024, Seonghek Kang obtained his PhD in early modern global history in the Pennsylvania State University based on the dissertation, “The Comuneros of Segovia: A City-Republic of Old Castile against the Spanish Empire, 1475-1525.” Afterwards, Kang was as an associate researcher of nationalism and transnational social movements in the Kyungpook National University Institute of American and European Studies before joining the MIAS. Kang’s main research interests concern the intersection of revolutionary movements, religion, empires, and imperial ideologies in the early modern and modern Spain focusing on the Comunero Revolt. Outside the early modern field, Kang’s research agenda also includes the formation of national identities, nationalism(s), and revolutionary syndicalism and urbanism in the twentieth century Spain. In pedagogical capacity, Kang has taught courses on the introductory European history, Crusades, early modern empires, and the history of global communism.
Research project
As per my scholarly profile, I am currently engaged in two projects respectively concerning the early modern, and the modern periods. The first, main project, “The Textile Workers and the Popular Millenarianism in Comunidad de Segovia” analyzes the socioeconomic foundations, political outlook, and the religiosity of Segovia’s textile workers in the context of the Comunero Revolt. The research objective is to demonstrate the material and ideological origins of Segovia’s dissident working-class politics which characterized the city’s Comunidad with its distinct, radical militancy. From the standpoint of the existing Comunero scholarship, the project therefore seeks to provide a concrete, locally-based case-study of popular millenarianism which significance has been emphasized, but insufficiently studied. To this end, the main sources examined are judicial records in Segovia’s municipal and ecclesiastical archives, published or manuscript histories, and spatial studies of barrios, parishes, and urban infrastructure. From this investigative basis, the study focuses on the insurgents’ collective socioeconomic profile, rituals and religious ceremonies, structures of popular piety, and the patterns of insurrectionary behavior to reconstruct the sixteenth century urban laborers’ political aspirations and the sense of legitimacy. By exploring the intersection of this incubating ideological matrix with the wider crisis in the Crown of Castile, the research thus demonstrates how the working-class Comuneros conceptualized their distinct vision of the proper political order which culminated into the millenarian radicalism of 1520.
My second ongoing research, “Nationalism and Anarchism in the Red Milesia” explores the political thoughts of Jack White, an Irish revolutionary in the 1916 Easter Rising whom in 1936 became an anarchist as a volunteer for the Spanish Republic. Rather than biographic in nature, however, the project takes this colorful, yet relatively obscure figure to examine the mutual interaction between anarchism and nationalism in the twentieth century European context. Analyzing White’s autobiography and service records while comparing his trajectory with other international volunteers, the project seeks to understand the shared intellectual underpinnings, and the historical circumstances that produced the overlap between the two nominally incompatible, mutually antagonistic ideologies. Beyond the interactive analysis of nationalism and anarchism, the project further explores the influence of the deeper historical Spanish-Irish relations upon the motivations of the Irish volunteers, highlighting the role of historical imagination in the perception and understanding of the Spanish national identity and its place in the twentieth century European revolutionary context from a global perspective.
Selected Publications
2025. “From Local Grievances to a National Revolution: The Comuneros of Segovia and Conflict in the County of Chinchón, 1476–1521,” Héctor Linares and Rich F. Lizardo, The Contractual Monarchy of the Iberian World: Negotiating Power and Status in the Spanish Empire, 1500-1700, Leiden, Brill, forthcoming.
2025. “At the Crossroad of Empire and Revolution: The Significance of the Comuneros of Castile in Spanish History,” The Western History Review, 165, pp. 9-49.
2022. “City between a Striped Flag and a Bisected Banner: Contested Imagination of Barcelona between Catalan Nationalism and Anarcho-Syndicalism in Twentieth Century Spain,” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 47:1, pp. 49-74.
