Professor Kim is accepting MA and PhD students working on modern and contemporary Korean literature and comparative literature. 

Jina Eleanor Kim is associate professor of Korean literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. She is the author of Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan, a comparative study of modernist literature and culture emerging in Seoul and Taipei during the Japanese colonial era; co-editor of The Journal of Korean Studies special issue on “Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Culture, and Film,” a collection of essays that show how the movements across media can open up new ways of engaging in transnational, interdisciplinary work on Korea. She is currently completing a second book project on Auditory Texts in Colonial Korea, which examines the relationship between emerging genres and new sound media technologies especially through the study of radio and radio dramas. Her current research project is on contemporary global Korean literature and transpacific studies which probes the literary and cultural productions between Korea and global Korean diasporic cultures in order to understand the formation of world literatures. This study interrogates the system of literary prizes and engages with digital humanities methods. 

Broadly, her research interest area is in modern Korean literature and cultural history. More specifically, her research questions rest in the historical, theoretical, and philosophical concept of the “New,” whether they be material goods, social and technological revolutions, cultural and artistic movements, racial formations, or subjects of knowledge. Her other research areas include comparative colonialisms, in particular, between Korea and Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korean diasporic literatures; Intermediality, transmedia storytelling, and digital humanities; Sound studies; Popular fiction and popular culture; and History of technology and literature.

Publications (selected)

Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan (Leiden and Boston: Brill Press, 2019)

“Sonic Aesthetics and Social Disparity: The Voice of Villains in Ryoo Seung-wan’s Veteran (2015) and The Unjust (2010).” In Asian Sound Cultures. Ed. Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene, and Martyn Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.

“Rewriting the City: Yi Sang, Architecture, and the Figure of the Department Store.” In The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature. Ed. Heekyoung Cho. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.

“Urban Intrigues: Crime, Romance, and the Modern Girl in Colonial Korean Detective Fiction,” Chapter 5. In The East Asian Modern Girl: Women, Media, and Colonial Modernity in Interwar East Asia. Ed. Sumei Wang. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021.

“The Sonic Unconscious and the Wartime Radio Novel in Colonial Korea,” 275-291. In Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature. Ed. Yoon Sun Yang. London: Routledge, 2020.

“Broadcasting Solidarity Across the Pacific: Reimagining the Tongp’o in Take Me Home and the Free Chol Soo Lee Movement." The Journal of Asian Studies 79.4 (November 2020): 891-910.

“Between Documentation and Dramatization: Modes of Critique in South Korean Yushin-Era Radio Culture.” positions: asia critique 27.2 (May 2019): 397-420.

Teaching

Professor Kim offers courses that combine a focus on Korean literature and culture with an engagement of key problems in contemporary issues and comparative methodologies, such as diaspora and space; empire and imperialism; new media and technology; race and racism; and gender and modernity. All courses engage substantially with theories of modernism, transnationalism, and postcolonialism and are committed to diversity through pedagogy and content. 

Undergraduate courses

KRN 309: Languages and Cultural Formation in Korea

KRN 399: Global Korean Literature: Writing Self and Reading Others

KRN 361: Korean Popular Culture and Transnationalism

Undergraduate/ Graduate courses

KRN 410/510: Female Figures: Gender and Sexuality in Korean Literature and Media

KRN 410/510: North Korea

KRN 410/510: Transmediting History: From Premodern Korean Ficton to Webtoons

EALL 410/510: The Making of National and World Literatures: Power, Prestige, and Literary Prizes

EALL 407/507: Cultures of Protest in Modern East Asia