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, with especial interest in the intersections between poetry, music, and painting. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis in 2019, after receiving his B.A. magna cum laude in Anthropology from UC Irvine in 2007. 

Dr. Shadel's first monograph, Shuddering Century: Modernist Poetry in Colonial Korea and the Poetics of Belatedness (under contract with Columbia University Press), examines 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 time toward creative and unprecedented ends. 

His 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 zainichi writer 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. 

Dr. Shadel's translation of O Chang-hwan, Castle Wall: Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press's DITTA: Korean Humanities in Translation series. He has published articles on modern Korean and Japanese poetry, painting, photography, and popular song in the Journal of Asian Studies; Verge: Studies in Global Asias; positions: asia critique; Modernism/Modernity; Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, and Trans Asia Photography. 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.