Curriculum Vitae

EMPLOYMENT

• University of Southern California  |  September 2025 – current

Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korean Studies Institute

PI: Sunyoung Park

EDUCATION

• University of California, Irvine  |  July 2025

Ph.D. in East Asian Studies (emphasis on Feminist Studies and Critical Theory)

Serk-Bae Suh (Chair), Margherita Long, David Fedman

Dissertation: Reclaiming Our Time: Four Decades of Madness in Korean Women's Writing

• Columbia University  |  October 2017

M.A. in East Asian Languages and Culture

Advisor: Theodore Hughes

Thesis: Memories and Pain of Wŏllam in Yi Chŏng-ho's Umjiginŭn pyŏk and Kŭdŭl ŭn wae kassŭlkka

• Yonsei University  |  August 2016

M.A. in Interdisciplinary Korean Studies (일반대학원 한국학협동과정 석사)

Advisor: Kim Seong-bo (김성보)

Thesis: 1960년대 <대한뉴스>의 국가 이미지 형성과 여성성의 표상 (Representation and Regulation of Femininity in 1960s Korea through Taehan Nyusu)

• Wellesley College  |  June 2012

B.A. in Japanese Language and Literature, minor in chemistry

Advisor: Eve Zimmerman

PUBLICATIONS

• Monograph

Writing the Korean Madwoman: Remaking the Human in Modern Korean Women's Literature

book manuscript under preparation

• Peer-reviewed Articles

“Delicate Hands, Tender Voices, Slender Bodies: Articulating Female Labor through Beauty and Care in the 1960s Taehan News Newsreels”
Korean Studies Journal Vol. 49 (2025): 122–164. DOI: ks.2025.a960371

• Edited Volumes

Feminist Korean Studies: Reimagining Futures, Co-edited with Soyi Kim and Anat Schwartz
book proposal submitted to university press (potential press secured) and contribution abstracts confirmed

• Book Review

Book Review: Locating translingualism by Jerry Won Lee (Cambridge U, 2022)
Asian Ethnicity (May 06, 2024). DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2024.2352128 

• Translations

“Hwa-sŏn Kim,” “Yŏng-ja Kim,” and “Kap-sun Ch’oe”
In C. Choi, H. Yang (Eds.), Voices of the Korean Comfort Women. (Routledge, 2023)

FELLOWSHIPS & GRANTS (selected)

• Korea Foundation Fellowship for Postdoctoral Research, Korea Foundation  |  2025 – 2026

• Korea Foundation Scholarship for Graduate Studies, Korea Foundation  |  2022 – 2025

• Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship for Dissertation Writing, U.S. Department of Education through Center for Critical Korean Studies at UC Irvine  |  2023 – 2024

• Humanities Center Graduate Student Dissertation Research Grant, UC Irvine  |  2023

• School of Humanities Graduate Student Research and Travel Award, UC Irvine  |  2023

• Center for Critical Korean Studies (CCKS) Conference Travel Award, UC Irvine  |  2023

• Teaching Assistance Fellowship, UC Irvine  |  2018 – 2022

• Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) Graduate Summer Fellowship, UC Irvine  |  2021, 2022

• CCKS Graduate Summer Fellowship, UC Irvine  |  2022, 2019

• CCKS Graduate Student Research and Travel Award, UC Irvine  |  2019

• Center for Asian Studies Graduate Student Research Grant, UC Irvine  |  2019

• Regents' Fellowship, University of California, Irvine  |  2017 – 2018

• Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Conference Travel Award, Columbia University  |  2017

• Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Thesis Research Matching Award, Columbia University  |  2017

• FLAS Fellowship in Korean Studies, U.S. Department of Education through Columbia University  |  2015 – 2016

• Teaching Assistant Fellowship, Yonsei University  |  2012 – 2014

INVITED TALKS

• "Caught Between Self and Script: Locating Madness in 1950s-1960s Postwar South Korea"
  Guest lecture at University of Southern California, February 18, 2026

• "From Proletarian to Posthumanist Imaginations in Korean Feminist Writings: Kang Kyŏng-ae's 'Salt' (1934) and Han Kang's 'Flaming Trees' (2007)"
  Guest lecture at Marist University, October 13, 2025

• "The Housemaid: A Portrait of Life in the 1960s Korea"
  Guest lecture at Wellesley College, November 11, 2016

CONFERENCE ACTIVITY 

Selected Paper Presentations

• “The Mad, the Marginal, and the Nonhuman: An Ecofeminist Reading of Exclusion in O Chǒng-hǔi's Fiction”
  Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast 2026 Conference in Northridge, CA, June 24-26, 2026 (schedule tentative)

• “Chthulucenic Imaginations in Contemporary Korean Women's Literature”
  2023 Korean Literature Association Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, CA, November 11, 2023

• “Madness, War, and Nation: Feminist Reading of Postwar Korean Fiction, ‘Spirit on the Wind’”
  Worldbuilding through Global Asias: An Interdisciplinary Conference in Irvine, CA, April 21, 2023

• "Rumor Has It: Reading Yi Ch’ŏng-jun’s “Walls of Rumor” through Political Anarchism"
  Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference in Boston, MA, March 18, 2023

• "Becoming Tree, Becoming Girl: Ecocritical Reading of Madness and Violence in Han Kang and Bae Suah"
  AAS Annual Conference in Honolulu, HI, March 27, 2022

• "Her Gentle Hands, Tender Voice, and Slender Body: Shaping of Korean Femininity as Labor Force in the 1960s Taehan News through the Framing of the "Voluntary""
  AAS Annual Conference (Online), March 25, 2021

• "Tracing the Modŏn Ppoi: Bodies of Consumption and Hysteria in Colonial Korea"
  "Queering the Straits: Unruly Subjects Across Modern Korean and Japanese Studies," Series One: Remembering the 'Modern Boy': Gender, Empire, and Nostalgia (Online), February 20, 2021

• "Narratives against Violence: Ecocritical Readings of Han Kang and Bae Suah"
  Yonsei University 17th International Conference on Korean Language, Literature, and Culture (Online), January 27, 2021

• "Contamination of Affect in Tawada Yoko's The Emissary"
  ANIMAL ・ LIT Master Class and Graduate Conference on Japanese Environmental Humanities hosted by UC Irvine in Anza Borrego Desert Research Center, CA, December 11, 2018

• "한국 현대문학 속 광기의 비발성적 언어와 여성 주체: 한무숙의 '감정이 있는 심연'과 손소희의 '그 날의 햇빛은'을 중심으로" (Non-vocal langauge and female subjectivity of madness in Korean literature: focusing on Han Mu-suk's Kamjŏng i innŭn simyŏn and Son So-hŭi's Kŭ nal ŭi haetpit ŭn)
  The 3rd RIKS Academy workshop for Korean Studies doctoral students by Korea University in Seoul, Korea,  August 10, 2018

• "Formation of Nation and Portrayal of Women in Korea through the 1960s Taehan Nyusŭ"
  2017 AAS-in-Asia Regional Conference hosted by Korea University in Seoul, Korea, June 26, 2017

Panels Organized

• "Futures Imagined: Civil Resistance in 1970s and 1980s South Korean Literature and Art”
  Panel organized for the AAS Annual Conference, Boston, MA, March 18, 2023

• "Mad, Liminal, Fragmented, and Horrific: Gendered Manifestations in Postwar Korean Culture”
  Panel organized for the 27th Columbia Graduate Student Conference on East Asia at Columbia University, New York, NY, February 24, 2018

• "Construction of Nation & Self in Post-Liberation Korea”
  Panel organized for the 26th Columbia Graduate Student Conference on East Asia at Columbia University, New York, NY, February 25, 2017

• "The Formation of Minority Identities in Modern East Asia”
  Panel organized for the 25th Columbia Graduate Student Conference on East Asia at Columbia University, New York, NY, February 27, 2016

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Courses Designed & Sole Instructor of Record

• EAS 55/HIST 70A Madness and Society in Postwar Korea (4 units)

Lecture and Seminar on modern and contemporary Korean literature, film, and socio-cultural history

Program: East Asian Studies (cross-listed in History) at UC Irvine

2022 Summer Session I (36 students) 

• EAS 55/HIST 70A Reading Madness in Korean Society (4 units, online)

Lecture and Seminar on colonial & postcolonial Korean literature, film, and socio-cultural history

Program: East Asian Studies (cross-listed in History) at UC Irvine

2021 Summer Session I (17 students) 

Co-Instructor of Record

• Korean Language: Fundamentals 1A, 1B, 1C (5 units)

Lecture on first-year Korean language sequence

Program: Korean Language at UC Irvine

2022 Fall Quarter (24 students)

2019–2020 Academic Year: Fall (22 students), Winter (23 students), Spring (24 students, online)

2018 Fall Quarter (23 students) 

Teaching Assistant

• • EAS 55 The Location of Taiwanese Culture (4 units)

Discussion-based sessions on premodern & modern Taiwanese history, literature, and film

Program: East Asian Studies at UC Irvine

2022 Spring Quarter (72 students)

• • EAS 55 Korean Failures (4 units)

Discussion-based sessions on Korean films and history

Program: East Asian Studies at UC Irvine

2021 Fall Quarter (71 students) 

• • EAS 55 Introduction to Classical Japanese Literature (4 units, online)

Discussion and project-based sessions on premodern Japanese classics

Program: East Asian Studies at UC Irvine

2021 Spring Quarter (80 students) 

• • EAS 55 Stories from Korea (4 units, online)

Discussion-based sessions on colonial & postcolonial Korean literature and history

Program: East Asian Studies at UC Irvine

2021 Winter Quarter (70 students) 

• • EAS 40/HIST 70A Gender & Sexuality in South Korea (4 units, online)

Discussion-based sessions on modern Korean feminism, gender and sexuality politics, literature and films

Program: East Asian Studies at UC Irvine (cross-listed with History)

2020 Summer Session I (33 students) 

• • AsAm 55 Asian Americans & The Media (4 units)

Discussion-based sessions on cultural representations of and media productions by Asian Pacific Americans and Asians in the Americas

Program: Asian American Studies at UC Irvine

2019 Spring Quarter (59 students)

• • AsAm 52 Asian American Communities  (4 units)

Discussion-based sessions on the connections of race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, and class vis-à-vis the development of Asian American communities

Program: Asian American Studies at UC Irvine (Cross-listed with Social Science)

2019 Winter Quarter (70 students)

PEDAGOGY TRAINING & PROFESSIONALIZATION

• Grant-Writing & Research Development Institute, Humanities Center, UC Irvine  |  2023

• Summer Teaching Apprenticeship, Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI), UC Irvine  |  2022

• Certificate in Inclusive Hybrid Teaching, DTEI, UC Irvine  |  2021, 2022

• Certificate in Summer Remote Teaching, DTEI, UC Irvine  |  2020

• Humanities Pedagogical Certificate Program, DTEI, UC Irvine  |  2020

• Korean Language Pedagogy Training, Institute for Training Korean Language Instructors, Yonsei University  |  2019

• Course Design Certification Program, DTEI, UC Irvine  |  2018

MENTORSHIP EXPERIENCES

• Graduate Interconnect (GIC) Peer Mentor, Graduate Division, UC Irvine | 2023–2024

• Certificate in Mentoring Excellence Program, DTEI, UC Irvine  |  2023

RESEARCH EXPERIENCES

• Graduate Student Researcher, UC Irvine  |  2021-2022

PI: Sora Han (Department of Criminology, Law and Society)

Publications: Han, Sora Y. Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition (Duke University, 2024), Han, Sora Y. to regard a wave (Selva Oscura Press, 2024)

• Graduate Student Researcher, UC Irvine  |  2021

PI: Jerry Lee (Global Languages & Communications and Department of English)

Publications: Lee, Jerry Won. Locating Translingualism (Cambridge University, 2022), Lee, Jerry Won, ed. The Sociolinguistics of Global Asias (Routledge, 2022)

• Researcher and Translator, Seoul National University and UC Irvine  |  2018–2019

PI: Hyunah Yang (Institute for Gender Research at Seoul National University) and Chungmoo Choi (Center for Critical Korean Studies at UC Irvine)

Publication: Chungmoo Choi & Hyunah Yang, eds. Voices of the Korean Comfort Women: History Rewritten from Memories (Routledge, 2023)

PUBLIC-FACING TALKS

• "The Vegetarian: An Introduction"
  Invited presentation at Celebrating Korean Writer Han Kang, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate at UC Irvine, October 25, 2024

• "Interpreting the Comfort Women Testimonies: Open Discussion as Translators, Educators, and Students"
  Panel speaker at War and Women's Human Rights: Testimonies of the Comfort Women hosted by UC Irvine, June 7, 2019

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

• Journal manuscript review for Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 2026–present

• Organizer and discussant for Reimagining Feminist Korean Studies Workshop, Korean Studies Institute, University of Southern California, April 24, 2026

• Paper Discussant at the 2026 GWIKS Graduate Student Research and Publication Workshop, Institute for Korean Studies, George Washington University, March 6, 2026

• Paper Discussant at the 2025 Graduate Student Conference in Korean Studies, Korean Studies Institute, University of Southern California, October 24, 2025

• Moderator at the 2025 Korea Foundation-USC Korean Studies Forum, Korean Studies Institute, University of Southern California, October 16, 2025

• Graduate Student Advisory Board Member (Inaugural), International Center for Writing & Translation, UC Irvine, 2022–2025

• Discussant at the 2023 New Books in Korean Studies Colloquium, Center for Critical Korean Studies, UC Irvine, May 26, 2023

• Interpreter for Sympathy and Hospitality toward Overcoming Modernity with Writer Ch'oe Yun, Center for Critical Korean Studies, UC Irvine, February 7, 2019

• Guest Speaker for Alumnae Panel 2016: Life After Wellesley, Wellesley College, November 11, 2016

LANGUAGES

• Korean  |  native

• Japanese  |  advanced

• Mandarin Chinese  |  elementary

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

• Association for Asian Studies (AAS)

• Korean Literature Association (KLA)

• Modern Language Association (MLA)

• Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)