Evelyn Shih: Exploring the Narratives of East Asia
Evelyn Shih joined the University of Minnesota in fall 2025. As the inaugural Korea Foundation Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies and Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, Shih focuses on comparative media studies as well as the culture of East Asia.
What are your areas of specialty? How did you become interested in what you study and teach?
I do a form of cultural studies with a strong basis in media studies, affect theory, and phenomenology. I was trained in Chinese and Korean literary studies, initially, after getting a bachelor's degree in comparative literature; but my interests developed in film and media studies when I was pursuing my MA at the University of California Berkeley. At the time, I was actually between a career in journalism and a career in academia. It was the kind mentorship of the man who would become my PhD advisor, Andrew Jones, that inspired me to take the plunge into scholarship.
What courses are you currently teaching or looking forward to teaching soon? What's special about them?
Last semester, I taught a capstone course on film and media, SCMC 5001 - Critical Debates in the Study of Film & Media. It's a course for students in the studies in cinema & media culture (SCMC) major that covers many theoretical touchstones of the field. In practice, it's a fun class where we get to talk about big, heady concepts and bounce them off some interesting films. I am also looking forward to creative projects that many students are proposing for their final. I'm looking forward to teaching AMES 3556/5556 - Korean Film & Media this term, which will bring some of the same theoretical concepts to bear in the study of the Korean cultural field.
What projects are you working on right now?
My first book project is Cold War Laugh Lines: Comic Communication in Authoritarian Taiwan and South Korea. This project talks about different forms of comic expression—print comics, stage comedy, film and TV, literature—and analyzes how it was able to side-step the censorship regime of the Cold War. I am also working on a second project on "nonsense culture" in East Asia in the 1920s and ‘30s, which was linked on the one end with anti-imperialism and with modernist gestures on the other.
If you could design a course on any topic, what would it be and how would you frame it?
Right now, I'm thinking about designing a science fiction course focused on East Asia, and Korea in particular. There is a distinct discourse of science fiction in East Asia that has everything to do with how the region first encountered modernity, the existing narratives and mythologies of each culture, and their relationship to science and technology in the present. I am also interested in developing courses on the transnational forms of the movie musical, Korean culture in diaspora, and phenomenology—or how we know what we know through our senses.
This story was edited by Avery Vrieze, an undergraduate student in CLA.
