Doctoral Student in Asian Languages and Cultures
she/her/hers
About
Sonia Singh is an emerging scholar of contemporary Korean literature and visual culture dedicated to bridging Korean-Indian narratives and mediascapes. She is generally interested into two lines of inquiry: the dissonance between memory and historiography across partition literature and visual media from the early 2000s related to Korean, Indian and Panjabi experiences of national division, as well as articulations of pan-Asian solidarity and anticolonial resistance among diasporic movements via print internationalism in the early 1900s. Her multilingual projects examine how both audiences and narratives reimagine affective and political ideologies that traverse medial and geospatial boundaries across Asia and its diasporas. Sonia is grateful to the Department of ALC, the Rackham Merit Fellowship and the Nam Center for Korean Studies’ Graduate Fellowship for their support in her training and research.
Sonia holds an M.A. in East Asian Studies from New York University and a B.A., summa cum laude, from Rutgers University-New Brunswick. During her studies, she explored interests in intermediality, narratology and visual culture. Her master’s thesis project titled, “Intermedial Ruptures of Witnessing Oral History: Visual Historiography, Remediation and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Graphic Novels,” examines Gendry-Kim’s biographical graphic novels, Grass and The Waiting, as visual historiography that amplifies otherwise marginalized narratives of historical trauma from survivors of the Korean War and calls them “into being” as image-events. Such graphic novels thus resist revisionist discourse and instead call for contemporary audiences to witness oral histories as living, forward-moving histories.
This past summer, Sonia participated in Sungkyunkwan University’s IUC intensive for advanced academic Korean language training and presented her work on 20th-century anticolonial print internationalism across Korean and Panjabi diasporas. She has also participated in summer research programs with the Nam Center, Ewha Womans University and Rackham’s Michigan Humanities Emerging Research Scholars Program (MICHHERS). She has also gained research consulting experience as the Lead Researcher of HRCap, Inc., an Asian American global recruiting firm, where she leveraged Korean and English-language sources for market research and curriculum development.
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