Rate My Professor Su Yun Kim

Prof. Kim's research specializes in modern Korean literature and culture, with interests in imperialism and colonialism in the former Japanese Empire, gender and sexuality, race, popular literature including middlebrow and lowbrow forms, Korean literary history and the novel, and transwar and transnational Korean cinema. Her monograph, Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945 (Cornell University Press, 2020), analyzes discourses of romance and marriage between Koreans and Japanese through colonial-era print culture, literary texts, popular media, and film. She co-edited East Asian Transwar Popular Culture: Literature and Film from Taiwan and Korea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), exploring shared colonial and postcolonial experiences. Key articles include “Transwar Continuities of Colonial Intimacy: Korean–Japanese Relationships in Korean Cinema, 1940s–1960s” (Asian Studies Review, 2021), “Claiming Colonial Masculinity: Sex and Romance with Japanese Women in Ch’ae Mansik’s Colonial Fiction” (Acta Koreana, 2018), and “Racialization and Colonial Space: Intermarriage in Yi Hyo-sŏk’s Works” (Journal of Korean Studies, 2013). Her current book projects on middlebrow literature, feminist imagination, mobility, migration, and travel in mid-century Korea are supported by grants from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the Kyujanggak Institute of Korean Studies at Seoul National University.