We Jung Yi, Penn State University

We Jung Yi is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. Her book manuscript, entitled Remembering the Unfinished War: Literature, Film, and the Politics of Mourning in South Korea, engages with the cultural turn in Korean literary studies by tracing historical and aesthetic connections among diverse forms of Korean War memories. She is the author of “Between Longing and Belonging: Diasporic Return in Contemporary South Korean Cinema,” collected in Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2014).

 

Immanuel J. Kim, Binghamton University SUNY

Immanuel Kim is an assistant professor at Binghamton University SUNY. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Riverside and wrote his dissertation on North Korean literature. He turned his dissertation into a book manuscript called “Love, Writing, and the State in North Korean Fiction,” which he has submitted to University of Hawaii Press.

 

Ji Young Kim, University of Chicago

Ji Young Kim is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago who specializes in modern Korean literature. She is currently writing a dissertation regarding literary and cultural production of the postliberation Korea (1945-1950), with a focus on Korea’s literary decolonization, the memory and representation of colonial collaboration, and writers’ border-crossing as a way to resist the Cold War.

 

Sookja Cho, Arizona State University

Sookja Cho graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a Ph.D. in Chinese and Comparative Literature (Korean). Her research includes: pre-modern Korean and Chinese literature and culture, Sino-Korean exchange and East Asian comparative literature; gender and religious literature; performance literature; and oral storytelling and folk literature.

 

Wiebke Denecke, Boston University

Wiebke Denecke is Associate Professor of Chinese, Japanese & Comparative Literature at Boston University. Her interests include the cultural and literary history of early and medieval China and Japan, and recently also Korea; comparative studies of the literary cultures of premodern East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) and more broadly comparative studies of the premodern world. She is the author of The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi (Harvard UP, 2010), Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons (Oxford UP, 2013), and editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature (3rd edition, under general editorship of Martin Puchner, 2012). She is also the editor, with Kôno Kimiko, of Nihon ni okeru “bun” to “bungaku” (The Concept of bun^{writing, civilization, literature} and bungaku ^literature in Japan; Tokyo: Benseisha, 2013) and, with Kôno Kimiko, Shinkawa Toshio and Jinnô Hidenori, of Nihon “bun”gakushi (A New History of Japanese “Letterature”; Benseisha, forthcoming 2015).

 

Sophie Bowman, Ewha Womans University

Sophie Bowman, literary translator and masters student in the department of Korean Language and Literature at Ewha Womans University.

• 2015 International Communication Foundation Korean Literature Translation Fellow
• Alumnus of the LTI Korea Intensive Course (1 year full-time program) and Special Course (evening program), currently attending the Translation Atelier Course
• MA Korean Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London
• BA Social Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, London

 

Han Sang Kim, Boston University

Han Sang Kim received a Ph.D. degree in the sociology of culture and historical sociology in February 2013 from Seoul National University. His dissertation, “Uneven Screens, Contested Identities: USIS, Cultural Films, and the National Imaginary in South Korea, 1945-1972,” is on the American film propaganda activities and the negotiation for defining a national identity in South Korea during the Cold War. He received a M.A. in the sociology of culture in 2007 and a B.A. in German literature in 2003 from Seoul National University.

He worked as a cinematheque programmer for the Korean Film Archive for over four years. He is the author of the book, Choguk kŭndaehwa rŭl yuram hagi: Pak Chŏng-hŭi chŏngkwŏn hongbo dŭraibŭ, P’aldogangsan 10-yŏn [Sightseeing Modernization of the Fatherland: P’aldogangsan, 10 Years of Propaganda for the Park Chung-Hee Regime] (Korean Film Archive, 2008), and several articles, including “My Car Modernity: What the U.S. Army Brought to South Korean Cinematic Imagination about Modern Mobility”(The Journal of Asian Studies 75:1, February 2016) and “Cold War and the Contested Identity Formation of Korean Filmmakers: On Boxes of Death and Kim Ki-yŏng’s USIS Films” (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements 14:4, December 2013).

Dr. Kim is currently revising his dissertation to complete as a monograph for his first book in English, in terms of the sense of transportation mobility in film propaganda practices and representations in 20th-century Korea. He was the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Transnational Korean Studies at UC San Diego. He is currently a Visiting Researcher / Lecturer at Boston University.

 

Yoon Sun Yang, Boston University

Yoon Sun Yang is assistant professor of Korean and comparative literature at Boston University. She is now at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled From Domestic Women to Sensitive Youths: The Rise of Modern Korean Fiction, 1895-1918. Her recent publications are “Enlightened Daughter, Benighted Mother: Yi Injik’s ‘Tears of Blood’ and Early Twentieth Century Korean Domestic Fiction” (positions: asia critique 22 (1), Winter 2014), “From Female Ghosts to Ghostly Womanhood: Mt. Ch’iak (1908-1911) and Birth of Modern Korean Fiction” (Comparative Literature Studies, 2014, Vol.51(4)), and Review of Ruth Barraclough’s Factory Girl Literature (The Journal of Asian Studies 72 (4), 2013). She currently serves as a consultant reader for ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

 

Yunji Park, University of Southern California

Yunji Park is a PhD candidate of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in University of Southern California. Currently, she is working on the dissertation project, titled “Daughters of Freedom: Women and Their Cultural Representations in 1950s South Korea.” In her research, she studies women’s images and their agencies represented in the South Korean popular culture during the 1950s. In rediscovering the decade’s popular culture through a gendered analytical lens, her project portrays the 1950s as a culturally vibrant and majorly significant period in the development of South Korean popular culture.

 

Birgit Geipel, UC Riverside

Birgit Geipel is a 5^th year PhD-Candidate in the Comparative Literature Department of the University of California, Riverside. Her research interests include the study of Modern Korean, German and Asian American literature and film. Currently she is writing her dissertation on “Literary and Cinematic Representations of Division and Unification in Korea and Germany”. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2009. She spent two years as an exchange student and then later as a visiting researcher at Seoul National University and was funded by fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service, Korea Foundation and the Korean Literature Translation Institute.

 

Kevin Michael Smith, UC Davis

Kevin Michael Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include modern and contemporary Korean art, postwar Korean and North American fiction and poetry, critical theory, and the interrelations between art and literature and processes of postmodern warfare and militarization across East Asia, North America, and the Middle East. An alumnus of the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory and a frequent visitor to South Korea with Korean language training at Yonsei University, he is currently beginning his dissertation tentatively entitled “Minjung as an Unfinished Project: A Non-Teleological Reading of South Korean Painting and Protest,” which will examine Minjung artists including Shin Hak-chul, Lim Oksang, Oh Yoon, and the feminist Doongji collective against the backdrop of South Korea’s democratic thaw and the continuity of 1980s Minjung concerns – foremost among them national reunification, US militarization, women’s liberation, and the labor-capital relation – with post-IMF South Korean neoliberal inequality, structural adjustment, and crisis.

 

Jonathan Glade, Michigan State University

Jonathan Glade is an assistant professor of Japanese and Global Studies at Michigan State University. His research focuses on modern Korean and Japanese literature and, more specifically, how the US Military Occupation affected literary expression in Japan and southern Korea. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled From Imperial to National: Transformations in Japanese and Korean Literature, 1935–1952.

 

Gaehwa Bae, Dankook University & Harvard Yenching Institute

Gaehwa Bae is Associate Professor of the College of Liberal Arts at Dankook University and a Visiting Associate of the Harvard Yenching Institute.

Select Publications

1. Yi Taejun’s Thought and Literature after Liberation, 1945～1950, January 2015 (Korean)
2. Yi Tae-jun : the Origin of the South Korea’s Partisan Literature -Focusing on Its Aesthetic Characteristics and Political Issues, June 2015 (Korean)
3. Yi Tae-jun’s criticism on the Patriarchism through female heroin bildungsroman, April 2014 (Korean)
4. The Confrontation between South and North Korean Literatures and Its Main Reasons in the Nation Building Period, 1945~1953, December 2014 (Korean)
5. Yi Tae-jun’s Long Novels and the ‘Politics of Everyday Life’ as a Critique for the Total Mobilization under Japanese Rule, April 2013 (Korean).
6. The Party or Supreme Leader? Tae-jun Yi’s Choice of Patriotism, Aug. 2012 (Korean).
7. The Sacrificed Literature: Taejun Yi in North Korea, a Life Full of Ups and Downs, Aug. 2011 (Korean).

 

Michael Pettid, Binghamton University SUNY

Michael J. Pettid is Professor of premodern Korean Studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and also serves as the Director of the Translation Research and Instruction Program at Binghamton University (SUNY).  He has published widely on premodern Korea including monographs on the history of Korean cuisine (Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History, 2008) and an annotated translation and analysis of a seventeenth century novel (Unyŏng-jŏn: A Love Affair at the Royal Palace of Chosŏn Korea, 2009). His most recent book is a co-edited volume entitled Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: Critical Aspects of Death from Ancient to Contemporary Times (with Charlotte Horlyck, University of Hawaii Press, 2014).  His current research projects include a translation of the 18th century Kyuhap ch’ongsŏ [Encyclopedia of women’s daily lives] and a co-edited anthology of premodern Korean prose.

 

Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Duke University

Nayoung Aimee Kwon is Associate Professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Arts of the Moving Image and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Her current research focuses on comparative empires. Her book Intimate Empire: Colonial Modernity and Collaboration in Korea and Japan (Duke University Press, 2015) examines troubled colonial histories and postcolonial legacies through controversial interactions of Japanese and Korean writers and translators in the Japanese empire and its aftermath. She is co-editor (with Takashi Fujitani) of Transcolonial Film Co-productions in the Japanese Empire: Antinomies in the Colonial Archive. She has published in Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Social Text, Hanguk Munhak Yŏngu, among other venues, as well as literary translations from Korean and Japanese.

 

Dafna Zur, Stanford University

Dafna Zur is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. Her book manuscript traces the textual and visual landscape that was created by children’s literature in colonial and postcolonial Korea. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Acta Koreana, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, and International Research in Children’s Literature, and she has chapters in edited volumes published by Wayne State and forthcoming with Routledge. She has also published translations of Korean fiction in wordwithoutborders.org, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Short Stories, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture, and Waxen Wings.

 

Ellie Choi, Cornell University

Ellie Choi (Phd. Harvard, ’09) currently serves as Associate Professor of Korean Studies at Cornell University and teaches courses in modern Korean history, literature, culture, and film. Her book manuscript, Space and National Identity: Yi Kwangsu’s Vision of Korea during the Japanese Empire, explores the relationships among space, cultural nationalism, and historical identity. Professor Choi’s current research interests include spatiality, the Seoul city, the Diamond Mountains, visual culture, colonial tourism, and collaboration.