Doctoral Student in Asian Languages and Cultures
About
Anna Koch is a second-year graduate student in the Department of ALC, focusing on Korean- and Urdu-language poets from the late premodern period through partition-era contexts (mid-19th to mid-20th century). She is particularly interested in poetics of separation as they emerge in lyric traditions. Her research develops a transversal mode of analysis attentive to the legacies of premodern (cosmo-)relational literary systems, treating them not as parallel mysticisms but as differently mediated modalities of thought whose problematics take on new idioms and become legible under specific historical pressures. She therefore asks what forms of separation become thinkable within these poetic cultures, their subjectivities, and aesthetic attunements.
Early passions for language and cinema compelled Anna to study Hindi in adolescence and soon after ushered her toward formative experiences in South Korea (Yonsei University) and India (National Film Archive of India). Ever enticed by the global institution of the film archive, she is also involved in Film, Television, and Media (FTVM) studies here at U-M, where at present her interests include the classic Bombay cinemasphere and film ontologies.
Research Interests:
India; Pakistan; Korea; Poetry; Film; Partition; Geophilosophies
Languages:
Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Japanese; reading French and Italian; beginning hanmun (漢文) and Mughal Persian
