Assistant Professor of East Asian Literatures
Insects in Premodern Korean Literature and Beyond
My book, preliminarily titled Insects in Premodern Korean Literature and Beyond, will shed a light on ideas, perspectives and texts from Kory (918-1392) and Chosn (1392-1897) Korea pertaining to the representation and cultural status of a largely understood species: ch’ung (C. chong), i.e., insects, or, to be more precise, animals understood and classified as such in East Asia prior to the twentieth century. By focusing on a large variety of literary, aesthetic, ethical, scientific, or historical insects-related materials composed in both Literary Sinitic and Middle Korean, this book is to serve as a unique window onto medieval, premodern and early modern Korean perspectives on the natural world, habitats shared by humans and animals, epistemological practices and knowledge acquisition, as well as the dynamic, complex interactions between man and ch’ung in literature, philosophy, and culture in premodern Korea and the Sinographic Sphere.