Associate Professor, 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.
