Research Bio
Kevin Shadel is an assistant professor in East Asian Languages & Culture specializing in modern Korean literature and culture with interest in the relationships between uneven development, literary form, and periodization comparatively across East Asia and Euro-America.
Dr. Shadel has published articles on Korean and Japanese poetry, painting, photography, and popular music as well as several poetry translations. His first book manuscript, Shuddering Century: Korean Modernist Poetry and the Poetics of Belatedness, explores the compressed and accelerated reception of avant-garde aesthetics by poets in the 1920s and ‘30s as they grappled with problems of poetic composition, colonial underdevelopment, and historical difference. His second book project, tentatively entitled Meat Workers: Subsumption and Consumption from Moby Dick to Mickey7, examines literary representations of meat production globally via the transition from what Marx calls "formal" to "real" subsumption of human labor. By constellating a set of geographically, linguistically, and formally distinct but thematically affinal narrative texts, the project analyzes how the muscle tissue of humans and non-human animals alike comes to be commodified through the industrial operations of factory farming, motorized fishing, and cell-based bioprinting.
Selected Publications:
"Ports of Call: A Maritime Study of Korean Modernist Poetry," Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 10. no. 2, 2024, pp. 191-218.
"A Tune of Two Cities: Seoul, Tokyo, and the Timbre of Simultaneity," Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 83, no. 3, August 2024, pp. 573-593.
“Romanticism Strait: Coloniality and Liminality in Im Hwa’s Maritime Poetry,” Journal of Korean Studies, issue 28, no. 2, March 2023.
“The Promise of Unhappiness: Colonial Korea and Yi Si-u’s Surrealist Poetics,” positions: asia critique, vol. 30, issue 4, November 2022, pp. 653-78.
“Shuddering Century: Futurist Poetry, Colonial Korea, and Industrial Warfare,” Modernism/modernity, vol. 5, cycle 1, May 2020.
“Images under Construction: Photomontage in Interwar Europe and Japan,” Trans Asia Photography Review, vol. 9, issue 2: Circulation, Spring 2019.
“Japanese ‘Modernism at a Branch Point’: On the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama’s 1937 Exhibition,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, no. 26, March 2018, pp. 42-77.
"Vicarious Politics: Violence and the Colonial Period in Contemporary South Korean Film," Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 15, issue 12, no. 3, 2017.
Research Expertise and Interest
Korean literature and culture, comparative literature, critical theory, marxism, posthumanism, psychoanalysis