Underwood International College

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

Profile

I am a comparatist in a broad sense, interested in fundamental antagonistic structures that define diverse cultural paradigms and symptoms; how particular instances manifest the same trouble or, put inversely, attempt to address it differently. My research and teaching to date have pursued three concurrent trajectories, in modern and contemporary Japanese literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary popular culture with a focus on cinema. These interests often intersect at such key problematics as (post)colonial modernity, gender and sexuality, and global technological postmodernity. Before coming to UIC, I was an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at New York University and a Fulbright-Hays Fellow at Gakushuin University, Tokyo. 

Education

Ph.D. East Asian Studies (Modern Japanese Literature), Princeton University 

Courses and Current Research Areas

I teach mainly in two course categories: “World Literature” and “UIC Seminar.” The following are the titles of some of the courses I have taught in recent years.

“Reading The Tale of Genji”
“Lars von Trier’s Women”
“Jacques Lacan and Popular Culture (through Slavoj Zizek)”
“Freud’s Case Histories”
“Mishima Yukio: between Philosophical Rebel and Literary Genius”
“Murakami Haruki and His Contemporaries”
“‘Postfeminism’: Gender and Sexuality in Cinema”
“Family, from Youth to Death: East Asian Cinematic Perspectives”
“Love, Psychoanalytically Speaking”
“Freud: from Hysteria to the Oedipus Complex”
“Antithesis to Now: from Slavoj Zizek to Russell Brand”
“Camus, Duras, Sartre”

Selected Publications

“Man without Woman: The Sexual Relationship in the Postmodern Era,” in Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage, edited by Gitte Marianne Hansen and Michael Tsang. Routledge, 2021.

“Freud between Two Philosophies, or Psychoanalytical Transdisciplinarity.” Tamkang Review 51:2. Tamkang University Press, Taiwan.

“From National History to Subject in Writing: Reading the Colonial Korean Poet Yoon Dong-ju with the Zainichi Korean Writer Yi Yang-ji.” Postcolonial Text 15:1. Open Humanities Press.

“Difference, Trauma, and Affect: Accounting for Literary Desire in Psychoanalysis,” in Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté. Routledge. 2020.

“Losing Melancholia: Between Object, Fidelity, and Theory.” Cultural Critique 102. University of Minnesota Press. 

“Community by Death: Mishima, Bataille, and Metaphysics of the Flesh.” Comparative Literature Studies 54:2. Penn State University Press.

“Becoming Mad Bio-graphically: The Styling Body in Modern Japanese Literature.” Comparative Literature 66:4. Duke University Press.

“The Other’s Style: Text and Power in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature.” Imaginaires 18. Éditions et Presses Universitaires de Reims, France.