My core research interest is modern Korean culture, which I arrived at through eclectic training in literary, ethnic, film and regional studies. For the past several years I have been busy trying to understand postwar film cultures in Korea through the prolific and wildly itinerant career of Sin Sang-ok. The seed for this project was my PhD dissertation and the final form it will take will be in a book entitled The Split Screen. My writing is inflected by close attention to modern and contemporary Korean literature as well as to East Asian cinemas of a variety of periods. My approach to all of these texts and events is informed by a long commitment to critical theory. I am currently laying the groundwork for another research venture, through which I would like to reconsider the global “cold war” through the archives of Korean mass cultures of the 1940s and 1950s.

Since arriving at Princeton in 2007 I have taught undergraduate courses in Korean and East Asian cinemas and modern Korean fiction. I have also co-taught a class on contemporary East Asia and seminars on urban cultures in Korea and gender in contemporary Korea. My first graduate seminar, Critical Trespasses, was an attempt to think theory and East Asia together.

Education

PhD. East Asian Languages and Literatures. University of California, Irvine. 2008.

MA. English Literature. University of British Columbia. 2000.

BA. English Literature. University of Toronto. 1998.

Publications

“Regimes Within Regimes: Film and Fashion Cultures of the Korean 1950s” in Youngmin Choe and Kyung Hyun Kim eds. The Korean Popular Culture Reader. Duke University Press. (Forthcoming).

멜로드라마  , 스타일, 그리고 개발의 장면: 신상옥의  <상록수>와  <쌀> [“The Scene of Development: Melodrama and Style in Sin Sang-ok’s Evergreen and Rice] in Yi Sun-jin and Yi Sung-hui eds. 민족주의와 한국영화  [Democracy and Korean Cinema]. Sodo Press. (Forthcoming, December 2011)

“Visibility, Nationality, Archive” in Journal of Korean Studies 16.2 (Fall 2011)

“The Split Screen: Sin Sang-ok in North Korea” in Sonia Ryang ed. North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding. Lexington Press. (2009).