Travis Workman

tworkman@umn.edu

Educational Background & Specialties

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Educational Background

Ph.D.: East Asian Literature, Cornell University,

Specialties

Korean and Japanese literature, film, and intellectual history; state violence and historical memory; film melodrama; nationalism; humanism and its critiques; translation

Publications

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Publications

“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.
"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.
"Narrating and Aestheticizing Liberation in Hurrah! for Freedom and My Home Village." Review of Korean Studies 18, no. 1 (June 2015): 77-102.
“Other Scenes: Space and Counterpoint in Cold War Korean Melodrama.” The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 7, no. 1 (May 2015): 28-40.
"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.
"Locating Translation: On the Question of Japanophone Literature." PMLA 126, no. 3 (May 2011): 701-708.
"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.
"Sŏ In-sik's Communism and the East Asian Community." positions: asia critique 21, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 133-160.
"Stepping into the Newsreel: Melodrama and Mobilization in Colonial Korean Film." Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 3, no. 1 (May 2014): 153-184.
Workman, Travis, University of California Press (2016). Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan. University of California Press.
"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 no. 94 (Fall 2016): 156-172.
"A Minor Philosophy of World: From the Anthropological Illusion to Relation in Area Studies." Cultural Dynamics (February-May 2020).

Activities

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Activities

Research

Humanism, Empire, and Nation: Korean Literary and Cultural Criticism: A book of translated essays..
Political Moods: Melodrama and the Cold War in Korean Film: A monograph on the politics of mood in colonial, South, and North Korean film melodrama..

Awards

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Courses Taught

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Courses Taught

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