Bookmark and Share

Department of

English

Joseph Jeon

Associate Professor

Dr. Joseph Jeon has taught at USD since 2001.  He is Poetry Editor for Kaya, a publisher of Asian/diasporic literature and culture, and serves on the editorial board of 1913: a journal of forms.

Dr. Jeon is on leave 2011-2012.

 

Education

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

B.A.  Johns Hopkins University

Scholarly and Creative Work

Professor Jeon recently finished a book entitled: Racial Things: Visuality and Racialization in Avant-garde Asian American Poetry.  The book is a critical study of a number of contemporary Asian American poets who use avant-garde treatments of things to intervene in American racial discourse in lieu of claiming the resistant identities usually associated with minority writing.  Invoking the foreignness of an avant-garde art object as a way to query racial otherness, these writers model the possibility of a post-identity, racial politics that challenges how race is fundamentally visualized.  In addition to appealing to those interested in Asian American studies and race in American literature, Racial Things also addresses readers interested in contemporary poetry, art, and visual culture, paying particular attention to the intersections between literary and visual art.  He has two future projects that concern issues of forgetting in contemporary culture. The first examines cultural memory in American "post-racial” discourse and the ways in which Asian American visual culture responds to these dynamics.  The second explores how traumatic memory—a dominant trope in Korean history—is re-formulated in recent Korean cinema under late capitalistic and post-historical pressures.

Teaching Interests

Asian American Studies

Visual Studies

20th Century U.S. Literature

Theory

Film