Rate My Professor Su Yun Kim

Su Yun Kim is an Associate Professor in Korean Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts, University of Hong Kong, where she joined in 2012 upon the launch of the Korean Studies major and currently serves as Programme Director and UGC Chief Examiner. She earned a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Yonsei University, and a B.A. in French Language and Literature from Yonsei University. Prior to her appointment at HKU, she taught at Hamilton College in New York State and held a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship at Doshisha University in Kyoto. As co-convener of the Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster (MEAL) at HKU, she organizes book talks, seminars, and conferences on modern East Asian literature.

Prof. Kim's research specializes in modern Korean literature and culture, with interests in imperialism and colonialism in the former Japanese Empire, gender and sexuality, race, popular literature including middlebrow and lowbrow forms, Korean literary history and the novel, and transwar and transnational Korean cinema. Her monograph, Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945 (Cornell University Press, 2020), analyzes discourses of romance and marriage between Koreans and Japanese through colonial-era print culture, literary texts, popular media, and film. She co-edited East Asian Transwar Popular Culture: Literature and Film from Taiwan and Korea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), exploring shared colonial and postcolonial experiences. Key articles include “Transwar Continuities of Colonial Intimacy: Korean–Japanese Relationships in Korean Cinema, 1940s–1960s” (Asian Studies Review, 2021), “Claiming Colonial Masculinity: Sex and Romance with Japanese Women in Ch’ae Mansik’s Colonial Fiction” (Acta Koreana, 2018), and “Racialization and Colonial Space: Intermarriage in Yi Hyo-sŏk’s Works” (Journal of Korean Studies, 2013). Her current book projects on middlebrow literature, feminist imagination, mobility, migration, and travel in mid-century Korea are supported by grants from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the Kyujanggak Institute of Korean Studies at Seoul National University.