I am a scholar of modern Korean literature with research interests broadly centered on the expressions of social criticism, ethics, and resistance found in women's literature's ecological imaginations.

I will be a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows at the University of Southern California in fall 2025. I received my PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Irvine.

My current book project, tentatively titled Reclaiming Our Time: Six Decades of Madness in Korean Women's Writings looks at how madness as a literary device is embraced and developed by Korean women writers to offer a feminist critique of postwar South Korean modernity. I interrogate Korean literature written by women from the mid-1950s to the 2010s with a special attention to portrayals of madness. Madness as a literary device and method of critique offered women writers a powerful way to reclaim memories, experiences, and identities coopted for nationalism, patriarchy, and developmentalism in the postwar era South Korea. Some of the writers I examine include recent Nobel laureate Han Kang, O Chŏng-hŭi, and Bae Suah. I put a spin on the popular criticism of women's literature as too intimate, personal and deviating from homogenized national (and often masculine) histories by underscoring the lived and gendered experiences as essential method of writing.

I can be reached at mwcho1@uci.edu.