Kevin Shadel

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 music 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.