Research Bio

Kevin Shadel is a scholar of Korean literature and culture and an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley whose teaching and research deals broadly with the mediation between literary and social form. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis in 2019, after earning his B.A. magna cum laude in Anthropology from UC Irvine in 2007. 

His first monograph, Shuddering Century: Modernist Poetry in Colonial Korea and the Poetics of Belatedness (under contract with Columbia University Press), 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 composition under conditions of colonial underdevelopment. The book proposes that while many Korean writers and intellectuals perceived themselves as latecomers vis-à-vis Euro-American cultural trends, the spatio-temporal gap between periphery and metropole afforded a certain privilege to eschew Eurocentric literary-historical time toward creative and unprecedented ends. 

Dr. Shadel's second book project, tentatively entitled Meat Markets: The Subsumption and Consumption of Flesh from Moby Dick to Mickey17, explores representations of meat production and consumption in works of literary naturalism, modernism, and science fiction, investigating how the organs and muscle tissue of human and non-human animals come to be complementarily commodified under industrial capitalism from its earliest stages up to the present and beyond toward speculative, often dystopian, futures. Individual chapters will treat discrete spheres of meat-oriented activity through a comparative, transnational approach spanning East Asia, the Americas, and Western Europe, including maritime fishing, canning factories, stockyards, and slaughterhouses as well as the cultural politics of vegetarianism, fast food, cloning, and even cannibalism. 

His translation of O Chang-hwan, Castle Wall: Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press's DITTA: Korean Humanities in Translation series. His previous translations of modern Korean and Japanese poetry have appeared in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture; Positions/Politics; Hyperallergic; and Asymptote. 

At UC Berkeley, Prof. Shadel teaches courses on modern Korean poetry and prose as well as comparative courses on East Asian literatures & cultures, including topical courses on science fiction, chuanqi or the "strange tale," and the radical 1960s. 

Research Expertise and Interest

Korean literature and culture, comparative literature, posthumanism, literature and psychoanalysis, Marxism