Ji Young Kim

Ji Young Kim

Assistant Professor of Korean Literature

Queens Hall, Room 225B
Phone: 718-997-5631
Jiyoung.Kim2@qc.cuny.edu​

PhD, University of Chicago
MA, Seoul National University 
BA, Seoul National University

Professor Kim joined the department in the fall of 2016. Her research and teaching specializations include modern and contemporary Korean literature, culture, and intellectual and political history in the contexts of colonialism and empire, the cultural Cold War, and postcolonial studies. While intent on situating Korean studies within Asian and global perspectives, she also seeks to bring to light the individual, unheard voices marginalized by the universalizing discourse.

She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Writers Between the Wars: Decolonization, Cold War, and Literature in Korea, 1945–1950, which examines how ex-colonized Korean writers responded to and negotiated with the Cold War reconfiguration as they struggled to confront their colonial past. By revisiting the literature and culture of the turbulent transitional period, her book explores complex interactions and dynamics between Korea’s decolonization and the global Cold War. She has contributed a book chapter to the Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature on the shifting implications of crossing the thirty-eighth parallel in the postliberation period, and has published an article in The Journal of Korean Studies about writers’ postcolonial self-reflections on pro-Japanese collaboration.  

Professor Kim has designed and offered courses on diverse topics including Korean Literature in Translation; Korean Women’s Writings; History, Identity, and Reconciliation in Korea; Colonialism and After in Korean Literature and Culture; and East Asian Civilizations, among others. She also teaches various levels of Korean language courses.