DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

Dahye Kim received her Ph.D. in Korean literature from McGill University in 2020. Her research and teaching interests include modern Korean literature and culture, critical approaches to media history, and the cultural dimensions of communication technologies in East Asia.

A key aim of her research is bridging literary studies and media studies. She is especially interested in changing the significance and signification of literature and literacy in the evolving media studies landscape. Currently, she is at work on her manuscript that is tentatively titled Techno-fiction: Science Fictional Dreams of Linguistic Metamorphosis and Informatization of Korean Language. This project situates the cultural phenomenon of online literature and writing as a contentious site where the older axioms undergirding the institution of modern literature come under criticism. To do so, she draws what German media theorists call the technik of writing—which includes both the technological mediation and the compositional technique of writing—to critique the writings of Korean science-fiction fans in the 1980s and 1990s. The project’s larger goal is to examine the postcolonial transformation of literary and other writing practices in relation to communication and information technologies by rethinking the transformation of the written Korean language through the progressive disappearance of Chinese script and the democratization of writing against the backdrop of the industrialization and informatization of South Korea.

 Before coming to Northwestern University, she was a Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow in the James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published on a wide range of topics, from colonial era Korean literature to graphic novels (manhwa).

 Selected Articles

“The Birth of the ‘Korean’ Graphic Novel: Manhwa and the Discourse of Gendered Realism since the 1990s,” in Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea, edited by Cho and Michelle and Jesook Song (Forthcoming, 2024)

“Who Is Afraid of Techno-fiction? The Emergence of Online Science Fiction in the Age of Informatization,” in the Journal of Korean Studies (Fall 2022) (Journal of Korean Studies' Outstanding Article Award for 2022)

“Yŏhaksaeng sutawa chŏnchaeng: chaptamŭi kinŭng-「Hangpokeŭi hŭin sontŭl」ŭl chungsimŭro (Chatter and War: The Function of Small Talk in Yi T’aejun’s White Hands Seeking Happiness).” Sanghŏ Hakpo, v.41, (June 2014)