Miseong Woo – University Seminar

Co-sponsored by Columbia University Seminar; Academy of Korean Studies

This research attempts to redefine diaspora from the 21^st-century perspective and investigates unique characteristics of Koreans’ diasporic experience and sentiments embedded in cultural production and consumption. As South Korea rapidly becomes a multicultural society that is transitioning from a traditional ethnocentric country of kinship to a globalized society of citizenship, Koreans’ collective desire to understand the nation’s history and restructure its racial, national, and cultural identity is exploding. As a powerful yet often overlooked medium in contemporary popular culture, theater plays an important role in reflecting sociocultural changes and political climate. This research investigates new theatrical undercurrents and unique Korean diasporic subjects whose experiences illustrate the problematic remnants of Korea’s troubled twentieth-century history.

Miseong Woo is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Her research interests include race, gender, modernity in modern drama, the literary and visual history of Asian diaspora, and cultural encounters between the East and West in popular culture. She published Representation of Asian Women in the West (2014) with Sam & Parkers, which won the 2014 Korea Research Foundation Achievement Award. She received a Fulbright Scholar Award for the 2011–2012 academic year, taught at Cornell University as a distinguished visiting professor in Korean studies in 2016, and was the first scholar selected as the Fulbright Korea Distinguished Chair at Emory University in 2020.