Biography
My research and teaching evolve around the relationship between the culture of publication and the historical experiences of modern Koreans, including the experiences of Japanese colonial rule, national division, the Korean War, the Cold War, and democratization. Through exploration of them, I pursue my particular concerns with gender on the one hand and with the literary text as embodied entity on the other. In my first book project, I studied the constitutive role played by Japanese colonial censorship in shaping modern Korean literature both physically and substantively. Currently, I am working on a book project tentatively titled “Rewritten in Divided Korea: Colonial Literature as a History, 1945-1960,” investigating the emergence of separate versions of the canon of modern national literature in a divided Korea.
Over the past few years, I have offered courses with a view to articulating the particularities of Korean experience and representations of the twentieth century against the backdrop of East Asia of the last century (examples: “Disasters and Memory in Modern Korean Fiction”; “Literature of War and Division”; “Gender and Modernity in Colonial Korea”; “The Making of Modern Chinese and Korean Literature” (co-taught with Professor Xiaobing Tang). I would like to expand my teaching interests in two directions: the Cold War Studies and Asian-American Studies.
Selected Publications
Beneath the Vermilion Ink: Japanese Colonial Censorship and the Making of Modern Korean Literature (Cornell University Press, forthcoming)
"Issues and Challenges for Post-Liberation Censorship Studies: Between Abolition and Adoption of Japanese Colonial Censorship System in South Korea,1945-1952" with Geun-Sik Jeong in Daedong Culture Research 74, no. 0 (2011) 7-60
"The Book Department and the Systematization of Japan's Publication Police in Korea, 1926-1929" with Geun-Sik Jeong in Korean Literature Research 30, no. 30 (2006) 103-170
“Impaired Body as Colonial Trope: Kang Kyŏng’ae’s ‘Underground Village’” in Public Culture 13.3, (2001)
“Another Layer of the Pro-Japanese Literature: Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi’s ‘The Wild Chrysanthemum’” in Poetica (Tokyo, 1999)
“Neither Colonial nor National: The Making of the ‘New Woman’ in Pak Wansŏ’s ‘Mother’s Stake 1'” in Colonial Modernity in Korea edited by Shin Gi-Wook and Michael Robinson, 1999)
Courses
- Writers, Journalists, and Censors in Modern Korea (Winter and Spring 2005)
- Autobiographical Writings, Gender and Modern Korea (Winter 2004)
- Formation of Modern Korean Literature (Winter 2004)