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The Department of
Asian Studies

We Jung Yi

Assistant Professor of Asian Studies

We Jung Yi is a specialist in modern Korean literature and culture. As the first Koreanist at Vanderbilt, her research and teaching explore how Korean people, ideas, and products traverse geopolitical divides and socio-technological infrastructure, with the goal of rethinking national identities, representational systems, and everyday practices in our ever-globalizing world.

Yi’s first book, Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 2024), challenges conventional narratives of the Cold War and its end, offering an alternative temporality based on original analyses of diverse cultural texts. Covering a variety of works—from influential novels of dissent during the authoritarian era to blockbuster films and popular webtoons of the new millennium—she characterizes the protagonists’ traumatic survival and warped growth in the wake of the Korean War as “wormification.” Whether embodied as refugees, leftists, or broken families, they nonetheless bear the potential of transformative living.

Yi is currently working on two intertwined projects. The first, Heroic Outcasts: The Korean Diaspora across Cold War Borders, extends her interest in the politics and aesthetics of memory by examining the Korean diaspora’s symbolic return through various media to their divided homeland. Her intersectional approach to evolving forms of biography, in both Koreas and beyond, aims to intervene in English-language discourses on colonial migration, model minorities, and neoliberal multiculturalism.

The other project, Justice in Excess: Dealing with Inequalities in Korean Popular Culture, involves Yi’s long-term efforts to historicize Koreanized genres of excess, from sinp’a theater and comic strips (both introduced during the early colonial period) to the TV melodramas and post-apocalyptic webtoons that have gained transnational currency with the rise of the Korean Wave (hallyu). In tracing the multigenerational effects of violent modernization, this study probes the nexus of capitalist transformation, cultural hybridization, and media convergence.

Specializations

  • Cold War History
  • Postcolonial Theory
  • Gender Criticism
  • Translation Studies

Representative Publications

Books

  • Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024.

Refereed Journal Articles 

  • “Redrawing the Division Lines? Surplus, Connectivity, and Remediation in the South Korean Webtoon Secretly, Greatly.” positions: asia critique 28, no. 4 (November 2020), pp. 701–27.  
  • “Between Incomplete Remembering and Failed Forgetting: Thinking about South Korean Memory Culture.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5, no. 2 (Fall 2019), pp. 21–27. 
  • “Resisting the Spell of Oblivion A Conversation with Taeho Yoon.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5, no. 2 (Fall 2019), pp. 55–75. 
  • “The Pleasure of Mourning: Korean War Blockbusters in Post–Cold War South Korea, 1998–2008.” The Journal of Cinema & Media Studies 58, no. 1 (Fall 2018), pp. 118–40. 
  • “Melodramatic Tactics for Survival in the Neoliberal Era: Excess and Justice in The Heirs and My Love from the Star.” The Journal of Korean Studies 23, no. 1 (March 2018), pp. 153–73.

Edited Volumes

  • Co-editor (with Tina Chen and Josephine Park), “Forgetting Wars.” Special issue, Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5, no. 2 (Fall 2019).

Book Chapters

  • “Division Literature and Visions for De-Bordering: Ch’oe Inhun, Pak Wansŏ, and Individuals without Belonging.” In Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature, ed. Yoon Sun Yang. New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 143–55.
  • “Between Longing and Belonging: Diasporic Return in Contemporary South Korean Cinema.” In Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema, ed. Rebecca Prime. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014, pp. 73–89. 

Translations

  • 멜로드라마와 모더니티  (Korean translation of Ben Singer’s Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts). P’aju: Munhak Tongne, 2009.
  • 아르테미스 파울, vols. I, II, and III. (Korean translation of Eoin Colfer’s fantasy series Artemis Fowl). P’aju: P’arangsae, 2007.