Kevin Shadel

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 expertise 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 Over Seas: The Maritime Itinerary of Modern Korean Poetry, retraces the mid-20th century seafaring journeys of Korean poets as they navigated, via corresponding lyrical and narrative forms, mutating regimes of neo/colonial power in the Asia-Pacific region. Attending to prominent topoi encountered amidst transoceanic passage by steamliner – seaport, wharf, deck, cabin, horizon, cloud, wave – in the poetry of Chong Chi-yong, Im Hwa, O Chang-hwan, Pak In-hwan, and Kim Si-jong, the project juxtaposes maritime infrastructures with poetic constructions in seeking to contextualize the shifting parameters of transnational (im)mobility for Korean (post)colonial subjects. 

His translated collection, Castle Wall: Selected Poems of O Chang-hwan, 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, he teaches courses on modern Korean literature in translation and in the primary language 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.