Kimberly Chung
Assistant Professor
Korea Foundation Professorship in Korean Studies
Kimberly Chung is a specialist of modern and contemporary Korean literary and visual cultures. Her book, The Sensational Proletarian: Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea (Stanford University Press, forthcoming July 2025), explores how colonial leftist Korean cultural production highlighted and intensified the sensations of the body to interpret class politics, drawing from and more fully articulating a focus on affect and the body already within Marxism. She has published research on modern and contemporary Korean literature, visual culture, and art in scholarly journals like Journal of Korean Studies and Acta Koreana, and has been a special guest editor for an issue on Korean literature and film for Acta Koreana (Vol. 17 no.1). She is also coeditor of an anthology on Korean contemporary art titled Korean Art From 1953: Collision, Innovation, and Interaction (Phaidon Press, 2020).
Modern and contemporary Korean literary and visual culture; Postcolonial Studies; Critical Theory
Her research explores the intersection of literature, aesthetics, narratives and intellectual history from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, and the representation and construction of subjectivities at points of social, economic and political transformation.