Associate Professor of Modern Korean History
About
Research Interests:
I am a cultural historian of modern and contemporary Korea who works across the disciplinary boundaries of urban humanities and visual studies. My research is concerned with the question of how history interacts with space. To be specific, I take the city as the subject of my study and also a method of doing history. This leads me to approach visual and textual manifestations of the city not as a reflection of historical reality but as constitutive of it. As I approach the city as the writing of history, I rely on semiotics in decoding space as language and text and employ interdisciplinary approaches of history, visual/media studies, urban humanities, and art and architecture.
My first monograph, City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism (Stanford University Press, 2023) is a study of how Seoul became a site of discursive production for Japanese colonialism: how architectural surface and space in colonial Seoul were instrumentalized to articulate a new mode of time—modernity—which defined the place of the colonized in history. This book layers visual and auditory surfaces of colonial Seoul from architectural ornament, signage, photography, print media, sound recordings, and alleyway chatter to show how the visual regime of Japanese colonialism was deconstructed through different sensory registers and to re-envision the history of colonial Seoul through a spatial model of sedimentary history.
My second book project, tentatively entitled The Han River: A Story of Urban Planning and Ecology, is a critical engagement with the postindustrial vision of the Han River, a river that runs through the capital city of Seoul in South Korea. It tells a story of how the development of the Han River became intertwined with the developmentalist project of the nation at large and how later initiatives attempted to rewrite the history of compressed modernity via reverse engineering and ecological restoration. It asks how we can understand the ecological turn not merely in response to crisis but also as potentially generating new ways of thinking about the relationship between built environment and nature.
Teaching interests:
My teaching interest is in the cultural history and cultural studies of modern and contemporary Korea. I offer undergraduate courses on the history of modern and contemporary Korea, Korean films, urban practices in Korea, and North Korean visual cultures. In my teaching, I introduce how to use non-textual materials in writing and studying history. My graduate courses deal with topics such as history and representation, theories of modernity, colonial/postcolonial studies, visual culture, and the city, urbanism, and urban humanities.
