Young Hee Kwon

Program: English Ph.D.
Began program in 2002
Area of Study: Late Victorian & Modernist Narratives

E-Mail: young-kwon-1@uiowa.edu

English is a roofless or even groundless shelter to me, a foreign student who sometimes dream in English, the other times in Korean. I do not know why I desire to dwell in this extremely uncomfortable house, but I do know it may be much more interesting only if I can put up with the insecurity, turning it into something else, something I might call a nomadic way of thinking, loving, and belonging.

I crossed the Pacific in August 2002. Before that I studied at the graduate school in Seoul National University, where I met many wonderful scholars. Here in Iowa I had met even more wonderful people. With them, I have learned to widen my subjects of study and to convincingly complicate them. For now I am planning to explore the ways the British Imperialism both as a geopolitical practice and as a discursive/cultural practice interacted with the formal shifts in some fictional narratives at the turn of the 20th century, and further, the interesting link between the rise and decline of so called high modernism and the shift in global dominance from Great Britain to the United States.