Travis Workman

Contact Me

tworkman@umn.edu
612-624-3827

Asian Languages/Literatures
220N Folwell Hall
9 Pleasant Street SE

Affiliations

• Asian Languages and Literatures

Educational Background & Specialties

Educational Background

• Ph.D.: East Asian Literature, Cornell University, 2008.

Specialties

• Korean and Japanese literature, film, and intellectual history; Marxism; postcolonial studies; humanism and empire; critical theory; film melodrama; Cold War aesthetics; North Korea

Courses Taught

• ALL 1910W Ideas of Culture in East Asian Studies
• ALL 3536 Modern Korean Literature
• ALL 3556 Korean Film
• ALL 3920 North Korea (DPRK): History, Literature, Film
• ALL 3920 Cultures of the Cold War in Korea
• ALL 8001 Critical Approaches to Asian Literary and Cultural Studies. Topic: The Colonial Construction of Asia and the West
• ALL 8002 Space and Modernity in Asia
• ALL 8920 Kant in Asia: The Politics of German Idealism

Publications

• Workman, Travis (2016). Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan. University of California Press. Link
• "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.
• "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 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.
• "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.
• "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.
• "Seo In-sik's Communism and the East Asian Community." positions: asia critique 21, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 133-160.
• "Locating Translation: On the Question of Japanophone Literature." PMLA 126, no. 3 (May 2011): 701-708.