Kyunghee Eo

My research examines the literary and cultural history of modern and contemporary Korea, with an emphasis on creative works by women and sexual minorities. I am particularly interested in how questions of aesthetic form, canon formation, and hierarchies of taste intersect with the study of gender and sexuality. 

My first book, Politics of Purity: Girl Sensibility in South Korean Literature and Culture, charts the historical formation of what is known in Korea as “girl sensibility” (sonyŏ kamsŏng), a visual and narrative aesthetic organized around the ideal of purity. While the aesthetic itself was bourgeois in origin, it increasingly came to embody the utopian aspirations of itsminoritized audiences as it was transmitted over the decades. Tracing its appearances in canonical literature, commercial writing, manhwa, film, and popular music, the book further shows how multiple generations of women and queer artists have used girl sensibility as a means of entry into cultural production.

I received my BA (2007) and MA (2012) in English literature from Yonsei University in South Korea, followed by a PhD (2021) in English from the University of Southern California. Before coming to Yale, I was Assistant Professor of Korean at the University of Colorado Boulder. My writings and translations have appeared in Revisiting Minjung (Michigan UP, 2019), Readymade Bodhisattva (Kaya Press, 2019), and Queer Korea (Duke UP, 2020), with an article forthcoming in Korean Studies.