About

Jooyeon Rhee is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Ph.D. from York University, obtained in 2011. Her multidisciplinary research interests include literary history, literary criticism, gender studies, post/colonial history and theory, film studies, food studies, and diaspora studies. Rhee's first book, The Novel in Transition: Gender and Literature in Early Colonial Korea (Cornell, 2019), investigates the transnational features of modern Korean novels at the intersections of nation, gender, and colonialism. She has co-edited several works, including Korean Culture from the Edge (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2025), Gender and Food in Transnational East Asias (Lexington, 2021), and special journal issues such as “Culinary Culture on the Move” (Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2023). Her articles and book chapters focus on Korean and Japanese literature and film, food studies, and diaspora studies. Currently, she is working on projects examining genre and gender in Korean and Japanese crime fiction, as well as representations of food in contemporary global East Asian literature and films, with a focus on the concept of ‘minor kitchen’ to explore networks and movements of people, capital, and ideas at the intersections of gender and race/ethnicity.

Selected publications

• Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945 By Su Yun Kim. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020. xi, 204 pp. ISBN: 9781501751882 (cloth).

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2022-02-01

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• Traumatic pasts in Asia: history, psychiatry, and trauma from the 1930s to the present

  Asian Studies Review · 2022-05-02 · 6 citations

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  "Traumatic pasts in Asia: history, psychiatry, and trauma from the 1930s to the present." Asian Studies Review, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

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• Witnessing and Remembering Trauma in Northeast Asia in the Visual Age

  Asian Studies Review · 2022-06-22

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  This Special Issue is a collaborative attempt by scholars of visual arts, cultural history and literature to contribute to the uncovering of symbolic and materialistic meanings and effects of visual art and media that address urgent issues in the lives of many people in Northeast Asia. Its first goal is to establish the context in which art makers are positioned and to discuss how their memory and post-memory of disasters shape the content of their works. Second, it explores the potential and limits of visual works to witness and remember physical and psychological trauma caused by the disasters. The third goal is to shed light on the ethical concerns surrounding the visual representation of disasters and victims. Its final goal is to explore how these artworks are grounded in the shared history of Northeast Asia during ‘the visual age’.

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• Cinematic Testimony to the Repatriation of <i>Zainichi</i> Koreans to North Korea in Yang Yonghi’s Autobiographical Films

  Asian Studies Review · 2021-02-11 · 1 citations

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  This article explores the cinematic potential of representing a silenced history of Korean residents in Japan who were repatriated to their “homeland” (North Korea) by examining Yang Yonghi’s films, Dear Pyongyang (2006), Sona, the Other Myself (2009) and Our Homeland (2012). About 94,000 Koreans in Japan were repatriated to North Korea between 1959 and 1984, but stories of these individuals after their repatriation are largely unknown due to the tightly controlled information about their lives in North Korea and the complex geopolitical relations among South Korea, North Korea and Japan. The repatriates and their families’ experience of separation and multiple displacements is a historical disaster borne of Japanese colonialism and the Cold War. Yang’s autobiographical films visualise the silenced suffering of repatriates in a poignant handling of space, objects and sound that articulates their affective reaction to their homeland. Yang’s works thus make two important contributions to our understanding of the historical disaster: they highlight the ambiguity of the homeland for the repatriates while functioning as a cinematic testimony to the silenced suffering of the repatriates and their families.

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