Venesia Delancy is a recent Posse scholar graduate from Mount Holyoke College (MHC). She graduated Cum Laude and earned a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations. Her interest in East Asian politics was initially sparked by her enrollment in courses such as “Cities in Modern East Asia” and her personal hobby of studying Asian languages.

During her time at Mount Holyoke, Venesia completed all the Korean language courses available in the Asian language department and achieved advanced fluency by the spring of her junior year. Venesia went on to become one of the first non-native Korean tutors for her college, and she was appointed as a Korean mentor during her senior year. Her active participation in the department earned her the 2022 Korean Cultural Center LA Award and she was awarded first place in the 2022 MHC Korean Speech Contest.

Venesia’s interest in Korean Peninsula affairs was reinforced by the completion of an ArcGIS map research project titled “The Bays of Busan’ during the spring semester of her senior year. The project highlighted the deindustrialization of the southern city during the postwar period and contextualized the socio-political factors that influenced the shift of industrial power from Busan to Seoul.

As a research intern at HRNK, she hopes to broaden her understanding of North Korea and its impact on global affairs, and also learn more about the social issues impacting the Korean Peninsula. In the future, she plans on pursuing her Master’s in South Korea and becoming a foreign policy researcher.