Dr. I Jonathan Kief

Office Hours: T 3-4, R 1-2, In-Person only
Zoom Link

Research

I am a scholar of modern Korean and comparative literature whose research explores the cross-border movement of texts and sounds between North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. My first book, Triangle Republics: Cross-Border Literary Transits in the Cold War Koreas and Japan (Columbia University Press), shows how writers in the two Koreas interacted with each other through the mediation of colleagues from Japan – in particular, members of the Korean diasporic community there. My second project, Interference/Interface: Broadcast Sound in the Divided Koreas, looks at how Cold War-era wired and wireless broadcasts – as well as their associated technologies – crossed borders in ways that: facilitated as well as interrupted communication; reshuffled the relationship between the textual, the sonic, and the dramatic; and transformed conceptions of labor, leisure, gender, and power. I am also interested in Cold War-era literary connections between Korea and Vietnam.

Awards

My research has been supported by the Korea Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Fulbright Program, and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. I have also received a Schwab Academic Excellence Award from the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC.

Publications

Monographs

Interference/Interface: Broadcast Sound in the Divided Koreas. Manuscript in progress.

Triangle Republics: Cross-Border Literary Transits in the Cold War Koreas and Japan (Columbia University Press).

Edited Volume

Writing the Korean Revolution in Japan: Literature from the Chongryon Community, 1950s-1990s. Volume of translations featuring Korean-language fiction from the Chongryon community in Japan. Currently in progress as part of the Three||Eight: Korean Literatures in Northeast Asia publication series from the University of Michigan.

Articles and Book Chapters

“In the Southern Half of Our Republic: Cross-Border Writing and Performance in 1960s North Korea,” Journal of Asian Studies vol. 81 no. 1 (February 2022): 81-100.

“Closed Borders and Open Letters in the Postcolonial Koreas,” in Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, ed. Heekyoung Cho (New York: Routledge, 2022), 427-440.

“Reading Seoul in Pyongyang: Cross-Border Mediascapes in Early Cold War North Korea,” Journal of Korean Studies vol. 26 no. 2 (October 2021): 325-348.

“‘Antagonistic Unity’: Kim Oseong, Dialectical Anthropology, and the Discovery of Literature, 1929-1938,” Review of Korean Studies vol. 16 no. 2 (December 2013): 81-124.

Translations

Ha Kŭnch’an, “Red Hill” (1964) with critical introduction, in Island Ablaze and Other Stories: The US Empire in North and South Korean Literatures, ed. Ruth Barraclough, Kim Jae-yong, Jin-kyung Lee, and Lee Sang-gyong (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2025).

Cheon Junghwan [Ch'ŏn Chŏnghwan], “Liberation-era Street Politics and the Production of Representation,” in Toward Democracy: South Korean Culture and Society, 1945–1980, eds. Hyunjoo Kim, Yerim Kim, Bodurae Kwon, Hyeroung Lee, and Theodore Jun Yoo (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies Press, 2021), 15-39.

Kim Yŏngsŏk, “Trolley Driver” (1946) with critical introduction, in Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire, ed. Theodore Hughes, Kim Jae-yong, Jin-kyung Lee, and Lee Sang-gyong (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), 377-392.