Founded by Dr. Kim Lyun-joon in 1939 in the eastern part of Seoul, Hanyang University is now one of the largest and most prestigious universities in Korea. The university currently consists of two campuses, 23 colleges, 100 departments, and 21 graduate schools and has annual enrollment totals of over 22,000 and 13,000 on the Seoul and Ansan campuses respectively.

While Hanyang has already established itself as one of the premier universities in Korea, its current goal is to become a truly global university. The realization of this goal has been proceeding in several stages. In the early 1970s, Hanyang established the Institute for Sino-Soviet Studies (ISSS) in order to promote scholarship on the communist bloc countries, with particular emphasis on China and the former Soviet Union. Since that time, the academic activities conducted by the ISSS have resulted in Hanyang University being recognized as a leading research center in those fields. However, with the advent of globalization and the collapse of the former Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe, it became evident that the academic activities of the ISSS needed to be reformed and expanded in order to keep pace with these changes.

Subsequently, Hanyang made provisions for the establishment of a graduate school of international studies in its five-year plan, drawn up in 1994. This advance planning paid off in 1996, when the Korean government awarded Hanyang a five-year grant to establish its Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) in the following year.

The creation in March 2004 of the Division of International Studies, a unique four-year undergraduate program integrating international relations, business education, and advanced language training, takes Hanyang’s globalization strategy one large step further. Indeed, in providing an international education, not only to DIS students, but to all Hanyang undergraduates as well as to exchange students from abroad, the DIS has quickly emerged as the engine of globalization at Hanyang.