Fall 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Asian literature, religion, and culture
Nari Yoon was born and raised in Seoul, and spent her childhood in Teheran and Mumbai. She received a master of international studies from Seoul National University in 2012 and a M.A. in Asian studies from Cornell in 2014. She briefly worked as an international news researcher at MBC Broadcasting Network in Seoul, and interned for NGOs in East Timor before coming to Cornell. Yoon is interested in investigating how political and economic policies affect human lives and she is particularly interested in the process of constructing modern national subjectivity in East Asia. She has recently finished her M.A. thesis comparing the political aesthetics of romantic love in Meiji Japan and colonial Korea. Her study explores the texts of Ozaki Koyo’s Kongjiki Yasha (The Gold Demon, 1897-1903) and Yi Kwangsu’s Mujông (The Heartless, 1917) to reveal how the modern idea of “romantic love” was utilized as an ideological apparatus in both Meiji Japan and colonial Korea. Through her analysis, she tried to show how romantic love, a particular mode of feeling or perception, of this era can impart a valuable insight in understanding larger economic and political structures of the time. As a Mellon Fellow, she would like to study more on the political unconscious manifested through architectures, films, and other visual, material, and literary texts of Asia.