Kyunghee Eo

Kyunghee Eo joins Yale as Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. She specializes in modern Korean literature and popular culture, with an emphasis on women’s literature, Korean LGBTQ+ culture and history, queer East Asian studies, and Korean American studies. In her current book project, The Erotics of Purity, Kyunghee examines representations of girls in cultural texts from the colonial period to the present-day moment, to show how the unique girl aesthetic that we see in South Korean cultural production today is not just a byproduct of hetero-patriarchal discourse but a cultural form that has articulated the desires and aspirations of women in Korea over the past century. She is also currently at work on the English translation of Nak Chung Thun (1875-1953), an early twentieth century Korean immigrant to Southern California whose epic fiction and short stories were only recently discovered and published in Korean. Eo received her B.A. (2007) and M.A. (2012) from Yonsei University and her Ph.D. (2021) in English from the University of Southern California. Before coming to Yale, she was Assistant Professor of Korean at the University of Colorado Boulder. More of her writings and translations can be found in Revisiting Minjung (Michigan UP, 2019), Readymade Bodhisattva (Kaya Press, 2019), Queer Korea (Duke UP, 2020), and VOSTOK (Vostok Press, 2016).