Kyunghee Eo

Kyunghee Eo specializes in modern Korean literature and popular culture, with an emphasis on women’s literature, Korean LGBTQ+ culture and history, queer East Asian studies, and Korean American studies. In her current book project, The Erotics of Purity, Kyunghee examines representations of girls in cultural texts from the colonial period to the present-day moment, to show how the unique girl aesthetic that we see in South Korean cultural production today is not just a byproduct of hetero-patriarchal discourse, but rather, a cultural form that has articulated the desires and aspirations of women in Korea over the past century. She is also currently at work on the English translation of Nak Chung Thun (1875-1953), an early twentieth century Korean immigrant to Southern California whose epic fiction and short stories were only recently discovered and published in Korean.

Faculty Fellow, 2023-2025