About Me

Jae Won Edward Chung is a professor, a writer, and a translator. He grew up in Seoul and Philadelphia and was educated at Macalester College, Swarthmore College, and Columbia University. Before earning his Ph.D. in Korean literature in 2017, he received his M.F.A. in creative writing and worked as a literary translator in Seoul and New York. He also taught undergraduate writing at Columbia and translation at Ewha Womans University and Literature Translation Institute in Korea. He lives in New York City.

From 2017 to 2019, he taught Korean studies courses at the University of Colorado Boulder as the first tenure-track appointment in Korean in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations. Since September 2019, he’s been teaching at Rutgers University-New Brunswick‘s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. He is also an affiliate faculty of the Comparative Literature program. He has taught courses on East Asian society and culture, Korean popular culture, Korean cinema, modern Korean literature, and Korean civilization.

He has contributed writing and translations to various literary and scholarly journals. In addition to giving research talks at universities around the U.S. and abroad, he has appeared in public events at the Korea Society, Korean Cultural Center NY, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He has shared his expertise with print venues for a broader audience, such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Review, The New York Times, The American Reader, Asymptote, and National Geographic.

He is currently working on four major scholarly projects.

• He is completing his first monograph on the intersection of literature, photography, cinema, and art of South Korea’s First Republic (1948-1960), entitled Aesthetics of Abandonment: Literary and Visual Culture of Early South Korea. The book theorizes the ontological concept of “abandonment” to think through conditions of biopolitical jeopardy, intermedial synergy, and postcolonial field formation.

• He is co-editing a special issue for positions: asia critique with Jung Joon Lee (Rhode Island School of Design) and Sohl Lee (Stony Brook University) on photography, temporality, and the decolonial imagination across Global Asias based on the April 2023 conference at Rutgers, which they co-organized.

• He is guest editing an issue of Perspectives in the Arts & Humanities Asia—a peer-reviewed open-access journal published by the Ateneo de Manila University—organized around the theme of remainder and disposability, entitled “Remainders Reimagined: The Aesthetics of Disposability In, Around, and Across Contemporary Koreas.” (Download Call for Papers.)

• He is working on his second monograph, which examines the shifting meaning of the political in postmillennial (post-2000s) South Korean literature under the neoliberal regime. His early reflections on the subject have been published in his works on authors Pyun Hye-young (in Boston Review) and Yun I-hyeong (in The Journal of Korean Studies). He is also exploring the interrelationship between literary creativity, translation culture, and social reproduction as forms of non-normative embodiment.

He is the Vice President of the Korean Literature Association, a series editor of DITTA: Korean Humanities in Translation, and the program director of RESA (Rutgers Ewha Study Abroad).

Reach him at jchung[at]alc[dot]rutgers[dot]edu.