Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies

Overview

Office Hours by appointment, Thursday afternoons

Ellie Yunjung Choi is Visiting Assistant Professor of Korean Media and Culture in the East Asian Studies Department at Brown University.  Her current research interests include the Seoul city, colonial Korea and P’yongyang, transnational food media, cyberspace, and dislocation.  She is the author of “Consuming the Korean Mobile Nation: Seoul, Dislocation, and the Search for Belonging in Korean (Food) Media.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (May 2023), “In the Shadow of Nation and Empire: North(west)ern (西北人) Writers in Colonial Seoul” Routledge (2020), and “Forgotten Memories of Modernity: Yi Kwangsu’s The Heartless and New Perspectives in Colonial Alterity,” The Journal of Asian Studies (August 2018).

Her first book project, Beyond the Nation: Yi Kwangsu, Travel, and Colonial Topography links Korean identity production to colonial space, by arguing that a spatialized reading of modern Korean literature unveils a triangulated colonial topography buried by national division. This spatial order lay beyond the much-studied binary of Korea and Japan, to include a “forgotten” northern identity centered around P’yongyang.  Dr. Choi is currently working on a second book-length project, “The Laptop Nation and the Global Consumption of Korea.”  She teaches classes on the "Korea brand" and media, Korean youth, urban space, transnational food media, and modern Korean historiography.   Dr. Choi was Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at Cornell University, and has also taught at Smith, Dartmouth, Yale, Yonsei, and Ewha Colleges.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS:

  • "Consuming the Korean Mobile Nation: Seoul, Dislocation, and the Search for Belonging in Korean (Food) Media.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (2023).  The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
  • “In the Shadows of Nation and Empire: North(west)ern (西北人) Writers in Colonial Seoul.” Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature.  New York: Routledge, 2020.  
  • “The Cultural Landscape of Colonial Korea's First Modern ‘Novel,’ Yi Kwangsu's The Heartless.” Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature.  Oxford, UK; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2020.
  • “The City and the Image: Seoul’s Recovery of Its Own Past.”  The Metropole Series. The Urban History Association.  March, 2018.
  • “Forgotten Memories of Korean Modernity: Yi Kwangsu's The Heartless and New Perspectives on Colonial Alterity.” The Journal of Asian Studies.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (August 2018). 
  • “Yi Kwangsu and the Post-World War I Reconstruction Debate in Korea." The Journal of Korean Studies.  Seattle: University of Washington Press (Spring 2015).  
  • “Minjok kaejoron” (On National Reconstruction, 1922), in Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era, Chris Hanscom, Walter Lew and Youngju Ryu, eds.  Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2013.
  • “Another Perspective on Yi Kwang-su: Selections from Yi Kwangsu’s Early Writings, 1909-1922.” In Azalea, vol. 4.  David R. McCann and Youngjun Lee, eds.  Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2010.

TRANSLATIONS

  • Yi, Kwangsu, “Minjok kaejoron” (On National Reconstruction, 1922), in Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era, Chris Hanscom, Walter Lew and Youngju Ryu, eds.  Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2013.
  • Yi Kwangsu, “Tonggyŏng esŏ Kyŏngsŏng kkaji” (“From Tokyo to Seoul,” 1917). Translation, in Azalea, vol. 4.  David R. McCann and Youngjun Lee, eds.  Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2010. 
  • Sŏng, Sŏkche, “First Love.” Translation, in Azalea, vol. 1.  David R. McCann and Youngjun Lee, eds.  Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.
  • Kim Suyŏng, “Ǒnŭnal  Kogung ŭl  naomyŏnsŏ (On exiting the imperial palace one day),” translation. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Literature, David McCann, editor.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.  

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