Yoon Sun Yang

Associate Professor, Korean & Comparative Literature

she/her/hers

Yoon Sun Yang is Associate Professor of Korean & Comparative Literature and of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her book From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Asia Center, 2017) won the James B. Palais Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2020 (Click on this link to see her recent interview with AAS about her award-winning book). She is the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature (2020) (visit this site to preview the book). Her recent articles are “Interracial Romance, Unlawful Marriage: Transpacific Encounters in Early Korean American Literature” (included in her edited volume) and “Madness, Medicine, and Masculinity: Kim Tongin’s “Oh, Frail-hearted!” (1919–1920)” in The Journal of Korean Studies 23:2 (October 2018).  She is now translating early colonial Korean short stories and essays published between 1907 and 1918 (for the MLA Texts and Translations series) while working on two book-length studies: “Beyond the Medical Gaze: Sexuality and Illness in Korean Literature” and “Transpacific Palimpsests: Early Twentieth-Century Korean Migrant Literature between Two Empires.” Her current research on transpacific literature has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship and a Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities Fellowship. At BU she teaches Introduction to Korean Literature, Introduction to Comparative Literature: East Asian Literature, Korean Cinema, Gender in East Asian Film, Growing Up in Korea, Majors Authors in Korean Literature, and Readings in Korean Literature.

Yoon Sun Yang’s CV