Jae Won Edward Chung has taught at Rutgers since 2019. He specializes in modern and contemporary Korean literature and visual culture, with a focus on theories of everyday life, embodiment, affect, intermediality, photography, and translation. He has taught courses on East Asian society and culture, Korean popular culture, Korean cinema, modern Korean literature, Korean civilization, the apocalyptic imagination, and literary translation.
His first monograph, Aesthetics of Abandonment: Literary and Visual Culture of Early South Korea, examines the intersection of literature, photography, cinema, and art of South Korea’s First Republic (1948-1960). It formulates abandonment as an intermedial ontology: a dynamic process of transformation by which the abandoned can become something more than abject by creating new meanings and possibilities. Aesthetics of Abandonment is under contract with the University of Hawai'i Press as part of the Hawai'i Studies on Korea Book Series.
His second monograph will explore the shifting meaning of the political in postmillennial South Korean literature under neoliberalism. His early reflections on the subject have appeared in his essays on authors Pyun Hye-young (Boston Review) and Yun I-hyeong (The Journal of Korean Studies). The book will also explore the interrelationship between literary authorship, translation culture, and social reproduction.
He is the Vice President of the Korean Literature Association, a series editor of DITTA: Korean Humanities in Translation, an executive committee member of the LLC Literatures of the United States in Languages Other Than English Forum of the MLA, and the program director of RESA (Rutgers Ewha Study Abroad).
Education
- Ph.D. Columbia University
- M.A. Columbia University
- M.F.A. Columbia University
- B.A. Swarthmore College
Areas of Specialization
- Modern and contemporary Korean literature
- Theories of everyday life
- Visual culture, especially photography and cinema
- Theories of race and affect
Publications
Peer-reviewed articles
- “Politics of Literary Materiality: Yun I-hyŏng and Post-Millennial South Korean Literature,” Journal of Korean Studies 27, no. 2, October 2022, pp. 329-52.
- “Maps of Life and Abjection: Reportage, Photography, and Literature in Postwar Seoul,” Journal of Asian Studies vol. 79, issue 2, May 2020, pp. 335-75.
- “Early South Korean Modernist Poetry: A Genealogy,” Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, vol. 13, May 2020, pp. 245-88.
Book chapters
- “Vitalism and Existentialism in Early South Korean Literature” in The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, ed. Heekyoung Cho, pp. 316-29. New York: Routledge, 2022.
Introductions
- “Slow, Quiet, and Flat—Moon Tae-jun’s Anti-Speed Lyric,” foreword to Brandon Joseph Park’s translation of Moon Tae-jun’s Flatfish (Rutgers University Press, 2025), pp. xiii-xvii.
- “Distant Poetry: Rethinking Modern Korean Poetry within Area Studies,” co-authored with Benoit Berthelier, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, vol. 13, May 2020, pp. 183-96 as an introduction to the co-edited special issue, “Modern Korean Poetry: Boundary, Dissension, Traversal.”
Scholarly book reviews
- Jung Joon Lee, Shooting for Change: Korean Photography After the War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024) in Journal of Asian Studies vol. 84, issue 2, May 2025, pp. 568-70.
- Christopher P. Hanscom, Impossible speech: the politics of representation in contemporary Korean literature and film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024) in Asian Studies Review, DOI: 10.1080/10357823.2024.2382930, July 22, 2024.
Literary reviews
- “On The Eve of the Uprising,” a review of Hwang Jung-eun’s dd’s Umbrella (2025) for Korean Literature Now, Winter Issue, December 2025.
- “Paranoid Wonder,” a review of Yi Sang’s Selected Works (2020) for Asymptote Journal, October 31, 2020.
- “Dystopia is Everywhere,” a review of Hye-young Pyun’s novel City of Ash and Red (2018) for Boston Review, February 14, 2019.