Soh Jaipil Lecture Series
Speaker
Christina Klein, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies, Boston College
Moderator
Immanuel Kim, Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies,
the George Washington University
Date&Time
Friday, October 30, 2020
2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Virtual Event
Event Description
South Korea in the 1950s was home to a burgeoning film culture, one of the many “Golden Age cinemas” that flourished in Asia during the postwar years. Cold War Cosmopolitanism offers a transnational cultural history of South Korean film style in this period, focusing on the works of Han Hyung-mo, director of the era’s most glamorous and popular women’s pictures, including the blockbuster Madame Freedom (1956). Christina Klein provides a unique approach to the study of film style, illuminating how Han’s films took shape within a “free world” network of aesthetic and material ties created by the legacies of Japanese colonialism, the construction of US military bases, the waging of the cultural Cold War, the forging of regional political alliances, and the import of popular cultures from around the world.
Speaker
Christina Klein holds a BA in Film Studies from Wesleyan and Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. In addition to her new book, Cold War Cosmopolitanism, which was just published by the University of California Press, she is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (California, 2003). Her articles on Korean and other Asian cinemas have been published in The Journal of Korean Studies, Transnational Cinemas, American Quarterly, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Comparative American Studies, and Cinema Journal. She teaches film, English, and American Studies at Boston College.
Moderator
Immanuel Kim is Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies. Prior to working at the George Washington University, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). Dr. Kim received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. He is an authority on North Korean literature and film and is the author of a recent book on North Korean literature, Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction (University of Hawaii Press, 2018).
