My research brings together the fields of Korean and Japanese cultural history, literature and translation. It aligns itself with a body of scholarship that has reassessed activist formations around the world, and seeks to understand the strategies by which marginalized people have contested dominant cultures.
Since I am interested in the role culture plays in political change, I embrace a capacious understanding of literature: in my research I draw on a broad array of cultural sources, including non-canonical works of fiction, reportage, memoires and other archival texts found in literary journals and activist newspapers. This allows me to ask a range of questions about the means by which activists mobilize social movements, the translation of justice and responsibility into cultural forms, and the ways in which ordinary people, communities, institutions and intellectuals tell their stories.
With a PhD from the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, I have spent many years in Japan and South Korea doing research, most recently in Tokyo and Kyushu, where I surveyed various archives for an upcoming monograph called "From Across the Genkai Sea: Japanese Culture and the Korean War." My most recent book-length translation projects are: Five Faces of Japanese Feminism: Crimson and Other Works (Univ. Hawaii Press, 2016), a collection of translated stories by Sata Ineko, funded with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Century of Queer Korean Fiction (and its companion volume in Korean, 한국의 퀴어 문학: 한 세기) was also published by the Modern Language Association in 2023, and was the first anthology of queer Korean writings--including works from the colonial period to the present--to be published in either Korean or English. Anthologies of fiction about the city of Pyongyang and of Japanese-language writings by Korean women are forthcoming, as is a popular-oriented book about "The Bad Gays of Japan".
My teaching at Brown focuses broadly on Japanese and Korean culture, the historical relationship between Japan and Korea, as well as the translation of minority literary culture in both Japan and Korea. I have a budding interest in the language and literature of Vietnam and its modern connections to Japan and Korea as well in the contexts of both queer culture and US-instigated war.
Please visit my website here for links to my publications.