Research Expertise and Interest

Korean literature and culture

Research Description

Kevin Shadel is an assistant professor in East Asian Languages & Culture who specializes in Korean literature and culture with emphasis on poetry and poetics. His scholarly practice is concerned broadly with aesthetics and politics in colonial Korea and its aftermath, pursuing questions of uneven development, literary form, and periodization comparatively across East Asia and Euro-America, with theoretical influences including Western Marxism, posthumanism, and psychoanalysis.

Dr. Shadel has published articles on Korean and Japanese modernist poetry, painting, photography, and popular music as well as translations of various works by Korean and Japanese poets. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, Shuddering Century: Korean Modernist Poetry and the Poetics of Belatedness, which examines the uneven and accelerated reception of the avant-gardes by Korean poets in the 1920s and ‘30s as they simultaneously navigated problems of both poetic composition and spatiohistorical difference. 

Selected Publications:

"Ports of Call: A Maritime Study of Korean Modernist Poetry," Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 10. no. 2, 2024, pp. 191-218.

"A Tune of Two Cities: Seoul, Tokyo, and the Timbre of Simultaneity," Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 83, no. 3, August 2024, pp. 573-593. 

“Romanticism Strait: Coloniality and Liminality in Im Hwa’s Maritime Poetry,” Journal of Korean Studies, issue 28, no. 2, March 2023.

 “The Promise of Unhappiness: Colonial Korea and Yi Si-u’s Surrealist Poetics,” positions: asia critique, vol. 30, issue 4, November 2022, pp. 653-78.

“Shuddering Century: Futurist Poetry, Colonial Korea, and Industrial Warfare,” Modernism/modernity, vol. 5, cycle 1, May 2020.

“Images under Construction: Photomontage in Interwar Europe and Japan,” Trans Asia Photography Review, vol. 9, issue 2: Circulation, Spring 2019.

“Japanese ‘Modernism at a Branch Point’: On the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama’s 1937  Exhibition,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, no. 26, March 2018, pp. 42-77.

"Vicarious Politics: Violence and the Colonial Period in Contemporary South Korean Film," Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 15, issue 12, no. 3, 2017.