As Korean studies emerged as an academic field in the second half of the twentieth century, Martina Deuchler, generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, contributed to the networking among Korea specialists isolated in a few European universities and was one of the founding members of the Association for Korean Studies in Europe (AKSE) in 1977.
From 1959 to 1963 she continued her studies of modern history of China and Japan as a scholarship student in the Regional Area Program in East Asia of Harvard University.
In October 1979 she presented a second dissertation (Habilitation) with the title "Confucianism and the Social Structure of Early Yi Korea" to the University of Zurich and was awarded the Venia legendi for Classical Sinology and Korean Studies.
The result of this two-year stay was the publication of Confucian Gentlemen and Barbarian Envoys (1977), a history of Korea's diplomatic opening by Japan and the Western powers at the end of the nineteenth century.
Thanks to her affinal relations through her husband, Dr. Ching Young Choe, she was granted unique access to social and religious traditions and ceremonies, rarely witnessed by Westerners, in a remote rural area in North Gyeongsang Province.
In premodern Korea, therefore, it was social origin (i.e., birth and descent) rather than political office that served to identify elite status.
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Martina Deuchler, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 18 works in 56 publications in 4 languages and 1,694 library holdings.