Assistant Professor of Modern Korean History
About
Current research interests:
I am a cultural historian of modern Korea. My research takes on the question of how history interacts with space. I approach spatial practices --whether it is the city, museum and exhibition, language, body, or media -- as the writing of history. I read space as language, narrative, and image, and employ interdisciplinary approaches of history, literature, visual/media studies, and urban studies. In my research, I examine the processes of textual formations of space, and show how the telos of history is inscribed in spatial forms.
Current projects:
I am currently working on a book manuscript entitled Seoul Streets: Surface Matters, Speech Matters. In this book I examine the conditions of modernity and colonialism in 1920s and 1930s Korea through the architectural and urban practices of Seoul. I read Seoul as space, language, and text in order to show how the city became a colonial discourse. I focus on how the city gave Japanese colonialism a spectacular vision of modernity, and how urban planning and architectural practices created a historical narrative and utopian vision of the Japanese empire through the kinetic optics of modern subjects. Among other things, I ask how the city was represented in image and text, what kind of soundscape it created, and how the city was experienced in lived time. To answer these questions, I examine the multiple layers of the city -- both visual and auditory -- including the ornamental surface of colonial architecture, signage, processions, and representations of the city in photographs, gramophone recordings, and popular journals. The goal of this research is to offer a multi-perspectival image of the city, which can be drawn by traversing many boundaries of material and non-material reality, the monumental and the mundane, image and sound, narrative and montage, and utopia and heterotopia. Through this study I try to explore possibilities of the everyday as alternative practices to that of colonial city.
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 am particularly interested in introducing how to use visual materials in history, and my graduate courses deal with topics such as history and representation, theories of modernity, colonial/postcolonial studies, visual culture, and the city rooted in the particular historical context of Korea.
