About
I am a specialist of modern Korean literature with research interests in politics and aesthetics of protest, cultures of authoritarianism, and mediatized publics in modern Korea. I wrote my first book on how Korean writers represented, organized and performed anti-authoritarian resistance in the 1970s, telling their stories by interweaving literary criticism with cultural histories of the developmentalist state and the global Cold War. This book, published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2016 as Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s Korea, was selected as one of the “Best Books of 2016” by Foreign Affairs and received the 2018 Association for Asian Studies James Palais Book Prize.
My interest in the authoritarian period in South Korea also resulted in an edited volume, Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2018. My other publications include articles on such topics as: gendering of Korea’s Vietnam War in film, moral dramas of inter-Korean reconciliation in Korean fiction, and the life and works of the controversial poet Kim Chi-ha. I co-edit the book series, Perspectives on Contemporary Korea, published by the University of Michigan Press.
Currently, I am working on a book that reexamines the history of South Korea’s democratization movement from the 1960s to 2010s through the analytical lens of media, which includes post-broadcast formats such as the podcast. Working on this book has made me an avid listener of political podcasts.
Youngju Ryu is associate professor of Modern Korean Literature.
