Jin-kyung Lee

Jin-kyung Lee received her B. A. in English from Cornell University and her Ph. D. from UCLA in Comparative Literature. She regularly teaches courses on Korean literature, popular culture, and film as well as courses on literatures and cultures of global Korean diaspora. She also teaches courses on gender and sexuality (Korean feminisms, Korean masculinities, queer Korea) and on race and migration (multiethnic South Korea), and on environmentalism on the Korean peninsula.
Her first book, Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work and Migrant Labor in South Korea (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) explored the intersections of South Korean militarism and the US empire, proletarianization of gender and race, and global Korean diaspora and global multiethnic diaspora in South Korea. She co-edited an anthology of Korean literature from the colonial period, Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013). Another co-edited book of literary works, Island Ablaze: the US Empire in North and South Korean Literatures (Cornell University Press, 2025) is forthcoming. She is currently working on a monograph on the colonial literary representations of capitalism and liberal ideas and their afterlives in contemporary South Korean popular culture.

Pronouns: she/her/hers

Languages: Korean, English

Books

• Island Ablaze and Other Stories: The US Empire in North and South Korean Literatures, Co-edited volume of short stories translated from Korean into English, with Kim Jae-Yong, Lee Sang-Kyung, and Ruth Barraclough. (Cornell University Press, 2025)
• Korean Literature, Literary Studies and Disciplinary Crossings: A Transpacific Comparative Examination, The Review of Korean Studies, co-guest editor, with Moonim Baek, Introduction. Vol. 16, No. 2, December, 2013
• Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire. An anthology of colonial proletarian literature. Translated 4 stories (approx. 150 pages out of 420 pages) and Co-edited with Lee Sang-Kyung, Kim Jae-Yong, and Theodore Hughes. (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013)
• Kŭndae Hanguk, Chegukgwa Minjok ŭi Kyoch’aro [Modern Korea at Crossroads between Empire and Nation]. Co-edited with Lim Jie-hyun, Vladimir Tikhonov, Hong Yang-hee, Chŏng Da-ham. (Seoul: Ch’aekkwa hamkke, 2011)
• Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work and Migrant Labor in South Korea, (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)
• Translation of Service Economies into Korean] Sŏbisŭ ik’onomi: hangug’ŭi kunsajuŭi, sŏng nodong, iju nodong [Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work and Migrant Labor in South Korea] tr. Na Pyŏng-ch’ŏl. (Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an, 2015)

Articles & Book Chapters

• “Sexual Violence and Its Ideological Labor: Imagining Masculinist Equality and Androcentric Ethnos” in Colonial Korean Literature,” The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, ed. Heekyoung Cho (Routledge, March, 2022)
• “Kim Tongin and the Political Legacy of Pure Literature in Modern Korea” for an edited volume, Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature, ed. Yoon Sun Yang (Routledge, 2020), 15-26
• “Afterword: Differently Politicizing Literature from the Authoritarian Era: The State, Antistate Leftist Nationalism, and Aesthetics” for an edited volume, titled, Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea, ed. Sunyoung Park (University of Michigan Press, 2019), 275-287
• “Changelings and Cinderellas: Class In/equality, Gendered Social Im/mobility and Post-developmentalism in Contemporary South Korean Television Dramas” for an edited volume, titled, Gender and Class in Contemporary South Korea: Intersectionality and Transnationality, eds. Hae Yeon Choo, John Lie, and Laura Nelson (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Berkeley, 2019), 16-36.
• "Visualizing and Invisibilizing the Subempire: Labor, Humanitarianism and Popular Culture Across South Korea, Southeast and South Asia,” The Journal of Korean Studies Vol. 23, No. 1. (Spring, 2018), 95-109.
• “Immigrant Subempire, Migrant Labor Activism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary South Korea” in Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society: A Global Approach, ed. Youna Kim, (Routledge, 2016) 149-161
• “Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity: South Korea in the Vietnam War, 1965-1973,” positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 17, No. 3, (Winter, 2009), 655-682
• “Performative Ethnicities: Class and Culture in 1930s Colonial Korea,” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, (Seoul: Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, Seoul National University), 19:1 (December 2006), 91-126
• “National History and Domestic Spaces: Secret Lives of Girls and Women in 1950s South Korea in O Chŏng-hŭi’s ‘The Garden of Childhood’ and ‘The Chinese Street,’” The Journal of Korean Studies, 9:1 (Fall 2005), 61-95
• “Sovereign Aesthetics, Disciplining Emotion and Racial Rehabilitation in Colonial Korea, 1910-1922,” Acta Koreana, 8:1 (Winter 2005), 77-107

• Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA
• B.A. in English, Cornell University