Lecturer
Houston Baptist U
Biographical Sketch: Jinang Kim earned her Ph. D in English from Texas A&M University in 2015, and is currently working at University of Texas at Arlington. Her major is Transnational Asian literature and culture with a special interest in Korean American Literature and Korean Literature in Translation. Her research investigates postcolonial aesthetics, body politics, subaltern resistance, and transnational circulation in contemporary literary world. Her study also explores intersection between trauma studies, body/gender studies and postcolonial/transnational theories with an interdisciplinary methodology that combines visual arts, film, literature and history. Her dissertation, Transnational Spectrality: History, Trauma and Phantom Bodies in Postcolonial Asian Art and Literature, discusses Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, along with visual art works that dramatize traumatic Asian histories such as military sexual slavery during Japanese colonial rule in Korea, the Partition of India and Indo-Pakistani wars, and the Sri Lankan Civil War. She published her article, “Historical Trauma and the Haunting of Comfort Women in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Yong Soon Min’s Art Works” in Critical Insights: Inequality (Salem Press, 2018).
Her recent research topics integrate discourses of posthumanism into analyses of postcolonial body politics and female subjectivity. She is conducting her research on “Vulnerability, Resistance and Politics of Female Bodies in Han Kang’s novel, Vegetarian (2007) and Lee Bul’s sculpture series and “‘Remember me!’: Trauma, Subaltern Body’s Haunting, and Transnational Circulation in South Korea.