Travis Workman

Publications

• Editor, with Immanuel Kim and Dong Hoon Kim, The Bloomsbury Handbook of North Korean Cinema. London: Bloomsbury, 2025.

• Political Moods: Film Melodrama and the Cold War in the Two Koreas. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.

• Humanism, Empire, and Nation: Korean Literary and Cultural Criticism / 휴머니즘, 제국, 민족: 한국의 문학과 문화비평. New York: MLA Texts and Translations, 2023.

• Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016.

• "World Cinema and Realism in 1950s and 1960s North Korean Film Criticism." In The Bloomsbury Handbook of North Korean Cinema, edited by Travis Workman, Immanuel Kim, and Dong Hoon Kim. 275-92. London: Bloomsbury, 2025.

•  “Humanism as a Problem of Empire in Modern Korean Literature.” In Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, edited by Heekyoung Cho. London: Routledge, 2022.

• "Mediating Neo-Feudalism." Postmodern Culture, vol. 31, no. 3 (May 2021).

• "A Minor Philosophy of World: From the Anthropological Illusion to Relation in Area Studies." Cultural Dynamics vol. 32, no. 1-2 (February-May 2020): 31-48.

• “The Colonial Frontier: Migration, Bordering, and Primitive Accumulation in Kando Literature.” In Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature, edited by Yoon Sun Yang. London: Routledge, 2020.

• "Visual Regimes of Juche Ideology in North Korea's The Country I Saw." In Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, edited by Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

• "Piagol (1955): Realism and Melodrama in the Anticommunist Film." In Rediscovering Korean Cinema, edited by Sangjoon Lee. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.

• "The Perils of Comparison in Subaltern Studies and its Critique." A review of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber and surrounding debates. Cultural Critique vol. 94 (Fall 2016): 156-172.

• "Parodies of Realism at the Margins of Science Fiction: Sin Sang-ok's Pulgasari and Jang Jun-hwan's Save the Green Planet." In Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Jennifer Feeley and Sarah Wells. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

• "Narrating and Aestheticizing Liberation in Hurrah! for Freedom and My Home Village." Review of Korean Studies vol. 18, no. 1 (June 2015): 77-102.

• “Other Scenes: Space and Counterpoint in Cold War Korean Melodrama.” The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema vol. 7, no. 1 (May 2015): 28-40.

• "The Partisan, the Worker, and the Hidden Hero: Popular Icons in North Korean Film." The Korean Popular Culture Reader, edited by Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe, 145-167. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

• "Stepping into the Newsreel: Melodrama and Mobilization in Colonial Korean Film." Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review vol. 3, no. 1 (May 2014): 153-184.

• "Sŏ In-sik's Communism and the East Asian Community." positions: asia critique vol. 21, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 133-160.

• "Locating Translation: On the Question of Japanophone Literature." PMLA vol. 126, no. 3 (May 2011): 701-708.

Activities

Awards

• McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, 2014 - 2016
• Talle Faculty Research Award, 2017 - 2019

Courses

• AMES 3536 Modern Korean Literature
• AMES 3556 Korean Film and Media
• AMES 3586 Cold War Cultures in Korea
• AMES 8001 Critical Approaches to Asian Literary and Cultural Studies. Topics: The Colonial Construction of Asia and the West; Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Translation
• AMES 8002 Space and Modernity in Asia
• ALL 8920 Archaeologies of the New Age