Jeong Eun Annabel We
Assistant Professor of Korean Literature and Culture; Director of Undergraduate Studies
- jwe@northwestern.edu
- 847-467-5941
- 1880 Campus Drive, Kresge Hall, Office 4-419
Jeong Eun Annabel We (she/they) specializes in modern Korean literature and culture and decolonial thought with a broader engagement with transpacific scholarship.
If you have media/interview inquiries, please consult this page. If you are a student with questions about working with her, please consult this page.
Her first book, Decolonial Becoming: Immobility, Indigeneity, and Disability in Transpacific Korea (under contract, Duke University Press) approaches the question of decolonization in Korea through an engagement with Korean, diasporic, Native American, and Caribbean thinkers and authors. Tracing how indigeneity and disability appear as immobility in the margins of multiple empires, Decolonial Becoming considers relations that are erased and forged under ongoing militarism and settler colonialism in the Pacific.
Her second book in progress, Archaepelago, examines the questions of spirituality and environment and how they shape art and social movements on militarized islands in the Pacific. The book also asks how historical settler and indigenous aesthetics of land complicate these expressions. She engages some of these ideas in “Minor Settler Grief” and forthcoming publications.
She received her B.A. from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University, New Brunswick from where she also holds a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies.
At Northwestern, she has offered courses on disaster narratives, feminist, queer, and disability issues, colonialism, decolonial thought, and transpacific literature. In AY 25-26, she will be offering new courses on body horror and transpacific art and the ALC research capstone seminar again in Fall ’25.
She is affiliated with the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, the Program in Critical Theory, Asian American Studies Program, and the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. In 2012, she co-founded the Critical Theory Research Workshop at Northwestern with Rafael Vizcaíno and X. Joyce Fan, with the support of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and now serves as its faculty sponsor.
Selected Publications:
Edited Issues
“Frantz Fanon, Decoloniality, and the Spirit of Bandung.” (with N. Maldonado-Torres, M. Fanon-Mendès-France, and Z. Radebe). Bandung: Journal of the Global South 6.2. 2019
Articles
“Minor Settler Grief: Korean Diaspora, Settler Colonialism, and the Pastoral Fantasy in Minari (2021).” American Quarterly 76.1: 83-101. 2024.
“Editorial Introduction: Frantz Fanon, Decoloniality, and the Spirit of Bandung.” Co-authored with N. Maldonado-Torres, M. Fanon-Mendès-France, and Z. Radebe. Bandung: Journal of the Global South 6.2: 153-161. 2019.
“Spirit of Bandung Beyond Colonial Mobility.” Bandung: Journal of the Global South 6.2: 190-209. 2019.
“The Transpacific Tempest: Relational Sovereignty and Spiritual Sociogenesis.” Cultural Dynamics 31.4: 375-398. 2019.
Book Chapters
“On Faith and Fabulation: Decolonial Thought, Speculative Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature. Eds. by P. Gopinath and L. Brueck. Routledge Press: 273-284. 2024.
“Decolonising Philosophy.” Co-authored with N. Maldonado-Torres, R. Vizcaíno, and J. Wallace. Decolonising the University. Eds. by G. K. Bhambra, D. Gebrial, and K. Nisancioglu. Pluto Press: 64-90. 2018. Open Access