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Department of English

Jeong Oh Kim

Senior Lecturer

Jeong-Oh Kim teaches as a lecturer at Vanderbilt University, where he studied the histories and theories of geography and their application to nineteenth-century British literature. He completed his doctoral dissertation entitled A Sense of Place and the Uncertainty of the Self and has been working on a book project tentatively entitled Romantic Thresholds. This work is part of a larger exploration of geography and cartography that increasingly concerns scholars of 18th and 19th century across a range of fields. He has published on space in poetry and the novel and has presented at a wide range of international conferences. He was the recipient of a Mellon Foundation fellowship and provided a professional service to the Modern Language Association as a Delegate Assembly. As a future humanist interested in contributing to the English-speaking world, he intelligently absorbs Anglo-American literary culture and re-interprets it for scholars and students of diverse nationalities and disciplines. His recent essay, “‘Happiest Find is a Green Spot’ mid Wastes’: A Sense of Place in William Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems,” which is currently under submission, calls attention to a geographic turn in literary studies. He is currently enjoying his role of VUceptor to make the intellectual community of Vanderbilt a far better and more vibrant place for all. 

Representative publications

  • The "Great Thoroughfare of the Brain": Road-making, Mapping, and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, The Journal of Eighteenth-century English Literature (Vol. 16, No. 1, 2019: 95--129
  • Translation of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and Letter to a Friend into Korean (forthcoming in 2019).
  • “Anne Finch’s Strategic Retreat into the Country House,” in Space and Gender in British Literature 1660-1820. ed., Naraine Mona and Karen Gevirtz (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 147—164.   
  • Abstract, “A Cultural Transference of Spenserianism in William Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems,” The Spenser Review, January Issue 2013
  • “Joseph Banks as an Avatar of Romantic Intermediality,” in Expanding the Frontiers of Comparative Literature. (Seoul, Korea: Proceedings of the XIXth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, 2013), 316-340
  •  “The Cultural Geographies of Romantic Authorship in William Wordsworth’s ‘View from the Top of Blackcomb’ and ‘Tintern Abbey.’” English & American Cultural Studies, 11. 1 (2011): 51-74.
  •  “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance as a Novel Space of Panopticism and Disciplinary Power.” Nineteenth-Century Literature in English, 15. 2 (2011): 253-80.
  • “The Political Economy of John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757).” The Korean Society of Eighteenth-century British Literature, 8. 2 (2011): 181-204

Conference Presentations 

  • “Joseph Banks on the Threshold of Cultural Entanglements," ISCES International Congress on the Enlightenment, U of Edinburgh, UK, July, 2019 
  • “Romantic Thresholds of Geography,” presented at the MLA, Chicago, 2019
  • “A Politics of the Land in the British Topographical and Georgic Poetry,” the 65th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Conference on British Studies, U of Kentucky, Lexington, 2018
  • “Ann Finch’s Retreat into the Country House,” presented at the 1st Kentucky Gender and Women’s Studies Conference, University of Kentucky, Lexington, September 2017
  •  “For a Scholarly Consideration of Anglo-American Writing Culture,” presented on July 2015
    • Invited to talk for faculty and graduate students
    • Department of English, Chung Ang University
    • In conjunction with BK 21—South Korea’s National Educational Project
    • Foreign Scholar Lecture Series
  • “A Sense of Place and the Uncertainty of the Self,” presented at the MLA, Austin, Texas, January 2015
  • “A Cultural Transference of Spenserianism in William Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems” presented at MLA, Boston, January 2013