Star historian Seol Min-seok to return to small screen in October

Star historial Seol Min-seok on his former television show "Seol Min-seok’s Naked World History” (2020) on tvN. [tvN]

Star historian Seol Min-seok, who has been on hiatus for a year and 10 months due to an academic plagiarism scandal, will return to the small screen in October.

According to MBN, Seol will be one of the co-hosts of the channel’s upcoming talk show “Greco-Roman Mythology — The Private Life of the Gods” (translated), set to start airing in early October. The educational talk show will discuss Greek and Roman mythology in depth in an entertaining way; Seol’s signature style of history education, for which he gained popularity.

Other hosts will include Professor Kim Heon of Seoul National University’s Institute of Humanities, an authority on Greco-Roman mythology; actor Han Ga-in and art director Han Jemma.

Seol was starring in numerous informational entertainment shows centering around history until December 2020, when was accused by a local media outlet of plagiarizing his master’s thesis. It was reported that his master’s dissertation paper, which he wrote on Korea’s modern history for Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Education, received a 52 percent plagiarism rating on the plagiarism review website CopyKiller.

Seol was embroiled in more controversy after he was accused of making factual errors on an episode of his television show “Seol Min-seok’s Naked World History” on tvN when talking about Cleopatra.

Seol later apologized for the controversies via his YouTube channel.

BY HALEY YANG [yang.hyunjoo@joongang.co.kr]