Research Bio
Kevin Shadel is an assistant professor in East Asian Languages & Culture specializing in modern Korean literature and culture with interest in the mediation between poetic form and social form.
Dr. Shadel has published articles on Korean and Japanese poetry, painting, photography, and popular song as well as several poetry translations. His first book manuscript, Shuddering Century: Korean Modernist Poetry and the Poetics of Belatedness, explores the compressed and accelerated reception of avant-garde aesthetics by Korean poets in the 1920s and ‘30s as they grappled with difficulties of cosmopolitan poetic composition under conditions of colonial underdevelopment. His second book project, tentatively titled Over the Mountain, Across the Sea: Lyric Topophilia and the Poetics of Deterritorialization in Modern Korea examines the alpine and maritime topophilia of mid-20th century Korean lyric poets as they adumbrated divergent attachments to space and place, whether late colonial period nostalgia for hometown and the "local color" of countryside flora, fauna, and pastoral life; longing for departure and escape from colonial oppression via transoceanic passage; or rejuvenated calls for spatial autonomy epitomized by the mountainside hideouts of leftist guerrillas or bbalchisan amidst the tragic Cold War division of the peninsula.
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.
Research Expertise and Interest
Korean literature and culture, comparative literature, critical theory, Marxism, posthumanism, psychoanalysis