Join the UWCKS on Friday, April 11, 2025 at 3:30 PM for a talk by Ji-Eun Lee, Associate Professor of Korean Language and Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.
The talk, held in celebration of author Han Kang winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, will introduce the author and highlight some of her major works. While incorporating excerpts to showcase the poignancy of her language, various issues, including gender and ethics of storytelling, will be noted in reading Han’s writings. The main focus will be Human Acts (소년이 온다, 2014) and The White Book (흰, 2016), two of Han Kang’s works that center on the historical past. From that vantage point, the talk will examine the shift in Han Kang’s literary trajectory from the wounds and pain of individuals to the brutality and compassion inherent in human beings.
Ji-Eun Lee, Ph.D. (Harvard, 2006), is an associate professor of Korean Language and Literature and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests range from the nineteenth century to contemporary times, covering topics such as women and gender, print culture and book history, memory and postmemory, and travel and domesticity. She published Women Pre-Scripted: Forging Modern Roles through Korean Print (2015) and a translation of I Met Loh Kiwan (by Cho Haejin, 2019), both from the University of Hawai’i Press. Most recently, she worked on Korean Sinitic Poetry from Ancient Times to 1945: Si in the East, a study of Korean hansi, with David McCann and Jang Wu Lee (Brill, 2024).