Kevin Shadel

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 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. His first book manuscript, Shuddering Century: Korean Modernist Poetry and the Poetics of Belatedness, 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. His second book project, tentatively titled Over Seas: The Poetics of Deterritorialization in Post/Colonial Korea, examines the transnational, seafaring journeys of Korean poets across the colonial and post-liberation eras, traversing the maritime geopolitical boundaries separating the Korean peninsula, the Japanese archipelago, the Pacific Ocean and Northwestern United States, and Southeast Asia under mutating regimes of neo/colonial power and aesthetic-compositional forms.