Associate Professor Asian American Literature, Modernism, Visual Studies

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon received his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in 2001.  He is currently finishing a book entitled: Racial Things: Visuality and Objecthood in Asian American Poetry.  The book is a critical study of a number of under-examined contemporary 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, from poetic features like lineation and ekphrasis to the material characteristics of book 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.  Prof. Jeon 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.

Selected publications:

"Speaking in Tongues: Myung Mi Kim's Stylized Mouths." Cross Wires: Asian American Literary Criticism, spec. issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination 37.1 (2004): 125-48.

“Eliot’s Shadows:  Auto-graphy and Style in The Hollow Men,” Yeats Eliot Review 24.4 (2007): 12-24.

"Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy." positions: east asia cultural critique (forthcoming).