Bios
Nadine Attewell is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, where she also directs the undergraduate program in Global Asia. She has published articles in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and sits on the editorial board of Trans Asia Photography. She is currently at work on a book entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City.
Jessica Bachman is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Washington. She specializes in modern South Asian and global Cold War history. Her dissertation looks at the USSR’s establishment of the world’s largest global book translation and publication program during the Cold War and analyzes its cultural and social effects across South Asia. Her research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, SSRC, Fulbright-Hays, American Councils, and CAORC. For the past two years, she has also worked in academic relations at Meta (Facebook).
Vero Chai is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. With an emphasis on Korea and the Korean diaspora, her research concerns the interplay of photography and literature, attending to their sonic, affective, intersubjective, and archival articulations.
Young-mee Yu Cho is Professor of Korean Language and Culture at Rutgers University and Director of the Korean-English Translation-Interpreting Certificate Program. She has published books in East Asian linguistics, KFL education, and Korean culture, including the most popular Korean language textbook series, Integrated Korean (1999-2021), The National Standards for Korean Language Learning (2015), Korean Photographs in the William Elliot Griffis Collection (2019),Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language: Theories and Practices (2021), You Call This Music?!: Korean Popular Music Through the Generations (2022), Rereading Chang Lee Wook’s Memoir (in Korean, 2022), and Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection (forthcoming in 2023).
Jae Won Edward Chung is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He specializes in modern and contemporary Korean literature and visual cultures. He received his BA from Swarthmore College and his MFA and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has previously taught at the University of Colorado Boulder and Ewha University. His work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Azalea, Apogee Journal, Boston Review, and Asymptote. He is writing a book about the aesthetics of abandonment in early South Korea.
Jie Guo is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests include women’s and gender studies, visual culture, literary theory, and comparative literature. She has published work in a variety of venues such as Modern Language Notes, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Prism, and Hanxue yanjiu (Chinese Studies). Currently, she is working on a project on photography in British Burma.
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry in the 21st c. She is also the director of Coffee Futures, an award-winning ethnographic film that explores contemporary Turkish politics through the prism of the everyday practice of coffee fortune-telling. For more than a decade she has been researching photography as a tool of governmentality in the late Ottoman period.
Jiangtao Harry Gu is Assistant Professor of Media and Society at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. His research examines questions of race, sexuality, and history in Asian and Asian diasporic visual cultures, including film, photography, and performance. His current book project Humor Before the Subject: An Asian American Theory of Laughter is a cultural history of post-war Asian American comedy. It is also a theoretical investigation of what remains possible for laughter today and whether it could lead us to racial justice and reconciliation. He has published articles and reviews in the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Trans Asia Photography, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and the Journal of Asian Studies.
Amy Kahng is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University and a Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her dissertation project examines twentieth-century Asian American artists and their relationship to land and landscape. Other research interests include global contemporary art, modern and contemporary art in Korea and transnational feminist art practices. An independent curator, Amy most recently co-curated Revisiting 5+1, an exhibition that reexamines Frank Bowling’s historic 5+1 exhibition at Stony Brook University, and co-edited the accompanying catalog.
Minna Lee is a Ph.D. student in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Her research interests center on visual technologies of citizenship and belonging in postwar Korea.
Hosu Kim is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, an affiliated faculty of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the College of Staten Island and the Critical Social Psychology program at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. Her current project explores the material, social, and cultural traces of the missing at the sites of state and imperial violence in South Korea, Vietnam, and Staten Island for alternative ethics and politics of repair in more than the human world. Her research interests include transpacific critique of Asian/Asian America, disability studies and critical university studies.
Sohl Lee is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Her first book Reimagining Democracy: The Minjung Art Movement and the Birth of Contemporary Korean Art, forthcoming from Duke University Press, traces the multifaceted process by which a particular decolonial aesthetics of politics emerged during South Korea’s democratization. Her upcoming book project explores the global circulation of North Korean art and visual culture as it intersects with the history of socialist international friendship, Third World solidarity, and decolonization projects across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Jung Joon Lee is Associate Professor of photo history and contemporary art at Rhode Island School of Design and a 2022-23 Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University. Lee’s research and teaching interests span the intersections of art and politics, transoceanic intimacies and decoloniality, and gender and sexuality. Lee’s forthcoming book, Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press) treats the transnational militarism of Korea as a lens through which to probe officially and culturally sanctioned readings of images when returning to them at different times. Lee is currently working on a monograph exploring photography and art exhibitions as a space of transoceanic collaboration, kinship making, and repair.
Nancy P. Lin is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at Cornell University. She is a specialist of modern and contemporary Chinese art and architecture with a particular interest in the relationship between art and urbanism. Her current book project examines locally situated, yet globally oriented site-based art practices in China during the 1990s. She is the curator of the upcoming Fall 2023 exhibition “Between Performance and Documentation: Contemporary Photography and Video from China” at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Her recent publications include a forthcoming article in Art Journal (Spring 2023) and an article in the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Intellect, Winter 2021).
Franz Prichard teaches in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His work explores the literature, visual media, and critical thought of contemporary Japan. His first book Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (2019) examines the rapid transformation of the urban and media ecologies of Japanese literary and visual media of the 1960s and 70s.
Thy Phu is a Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Visual Justice at the University of Toronto. She is the author of two books, Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture and Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam. She is also co-editor of three book volumes: Feeling Photography, Refugee States, and the forthcoming Cold War Camera.
Paul Schalow is a Professor of Japanese at Rutgers University. His publications include a translation and study of Ihara Saikaku’s The Great Mirror of Male Love, for which he received the 1990 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese, and A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan, which was nominated for the 2007 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. From 2018-2020, he participated in a 3-year Genji research project at the University of Paris and contributed an article, “Substitution in the Uji Chapters of The Tale of Genji,” to the culminating volume, Instances du sujet dans le Roman du Genji et au-delà (Tokyo: Seikansha, 2021).
Siona Wilson is a writer, professor, and curator living in New York. She is the author of the book, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Affects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minnesota, 2015) and numerous essays on topics including feminist film and video, documentary photography, performance, and sound. She is currently completing a book, tentatively titled, Errant Documentary: Women, War, and the Making of Gendered History with chapters addressing conflicts in Europe, North Africa, and Asia. Dr. Wilson is the Chair of the Performing and Creative Arts Department at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and is a member of the Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Andrés Mario Zervigón is Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (USA). He is the author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image (2012) and Photography and Germany (2017). With Tanya Sheehan, he edited Photography and Its Origins (2014), with Sabine Kriebel Photography and Doubt (2017), and with Donna Gustafson Subjective-Objective: A Century of Social Photography (2017). His current book project is a history of Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, for which he received a CASVA Senior Fellowship (2013-14). Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis devoted to photography studies.