2025-2026 Graduate Fellows
James Kiselik
I am a graduate student in the English department, where I study U.S. literature. My academic interest in Korea began during an undergraduate course studying how Japanese censorship policies affected colonial-era Korean literature. I’m still interested in how critical editions and translations interact with their historical contexts and I’ve been thinking especially about twentieth-century, trans-Pacific cases. For instance, in 1941, U.S. journalist Nym Wales published The Song of Ariran, her biography of the Korean anticolonial revolutionary Kim San; in 1972, the U.S. magazine Ramparts reissued her book, newly presenting it through their anti–Vietnam War values. I’m lucky to study at Michigan, where we have access to amazing resources like a rare 1941 first edition of The Song of Ariran. In my free time, some books I like re-reading include Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Recently, I’ve been listening to music by Leonard Cohen, Kim Choo Ja, and Balen Shah.
Elizabeth Jeffery
Elizabeth Jeffery is a master’s student in the Department of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is interested in exploring microbe-immune cell signaling interactions that may promote the development and progression of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Recently, she has developed a growing interest in how culture, diet, and medical perception may influence not only the molecular processes observed in IBD but also the ongoing disease and disability stigma worldwide. She is particularly interested in the rapid increase in IBD in South Korea since the 1960s and how urbanization and globalization have promoted cultural, medical, and dietary changes throughout the country, which may have contributed to this epidemiological shift. She is excited to engage with other Korean Studies scholars and advance her understanding of Korean history, culture, and language through the Nam Center Graduate Fellows program. Outside of academia, she enjoys all outdoor activities, traveling, and returning home to rural Texas.
Jace Jung
Jace Jung is a Ph.D. student in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, working on Asian American and global Anglophone literatures and posthuman theory. His research focuses on posthuman conceptions of race, being, and belonging as informed by the sensorium, environmental entanglements, and animal and technological multispecies figurations.
Hana Lee
My name is Hanna Lee, and I am a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Michigan. I am a comparativist working in historical political economy, with a substantive focus on Korea.
My current project challenges the common view that authoritarian rulers refuse to delegate simply because they are personalistic or unwilling to listen. Instead, I provide a systematic explanation for how non-delegation can arise from the survival costs of mistaken approval itself. Even when rulers have capable technocrats and extensive information, delegation may become politically infeasible when a mistaken approval could threaten their survival. I call this the “Competence Trap.” I develop this argument through Park Chung-hee’s South Korea, using archival records from the Export Promotion Conferences.
Outside of research, I enjoy exploring cities on foot, visiting bookstores and cafés, and spending time with friends and family.
Remi Lee
Hello! My name is Remi Lee, and I am a first-year Ph.D. student in comparative literature. I am interested in the Korean diaspora across Japan and Russia, diasporic literature, and how translation and the failure of translation expose tensions between language-nation relationality. In my free time, I enjoy knitting (if you see me at Spun, say hello!), embroidering, writing poetry, and going on long walks by the river.
Kunwoo Kwon
I am a second year master's student in the International and Regional Studies program (MIRS) at the University of Michigan. I work on Tang dynasty Buddhist scholasticism. I hope to understand the intellectual and sociopolitical contexts in which distinctive Chinese interpretations of Buddhist doctrine emerged. Currently, I am developing a research project on the Chinese interpretations of the four perverted views (si diandao, 四顚倒). My other academic interests include Chinese interpretations of ineffability, the influence of state censorship on the Buddhist canon during middle period China, and the history and practice of Buddhist monastic education in Korea
Seohyung Kim
Seohyung Kim is a Ph.D. student in sociocultural anthropology. She received an M.S. in anthropology and in the Ecological Sciences and Engineering Program from Purdue University. Her research explores how urban trees and the tree doctor system (나무의사) in South Korea become sites where environmental governance, biomedical approaches, and postcolonial politics converge. Her work brings together environmental and medical anthropology, political ecology, and feminist science and technology studies.
Yuyao Cheng
I am a doctoral student in Asian languages and cultures working on the history of repentance in East Asia, with a special focus on the Korean peninsula. My research follows Buddhist ideas and practices of repentance, confession, remorse, karmic repair, forgiveness, and absolution across texts, images, spaces, and materials. Taking the Korean peninsula as a critical site from which to reimagine both East Asia and the Middle Ages, I ask how repentance became a social technology for naming wrongdoing, redistributing responsibility, repairing relations among the living and the dead, and holding damaged worlds open to transformation. Rather than treating East Asia as a fixed cultural map, or Middle Ages as a self-contained period, I approach them as shifting networks made through ritual practice, textual circulation, bodily discipline, material exchange, and social memory. I am especially interested in the social and ritual encounters that brought Buddhist forms of repair into relation with other ways of understanding mistake, harm, responsibility, punishment, and pardon. My broader project seeks to recover neglected voices and social locations often obscured by elite histories: grassroots practitioners, lay communities, women, children, the sick, the dead, and those whose lives appear only briefly in traces and fragments. Methodologically, my research is interdisciplinary, combining textual analysis with ritual studies, material culture, religious anthropology, and intellectual history. I am drawn to moments when religious categories that seem stable become unstable, and when that instability reveals how people envisioned and pursued the repair of damaged selves, communities, and worlds.
Sonia Singh
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.
