Theodore Hughes

Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities

Office: 618 Kent
Office Hours: WR 3:00 pm-4:00pm
Phone: (212) 854-8545
Email: th2150@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of California, San Diego (’90)
MA: University of California, Los Angeles (’97)
PhD: University of California, Los Angeles (’02)

Classes Taught

AHUM UN3830 Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
EAAS GR8220 Virtuality & The Posthuman in Contemporary Korea
EAAS GR9500 Korean Literature & Colonial Modernity

Research Interests

Coloniality, Proletarian literature and art, Cultures of national division, The global Cold War

Theodore Hughes received his Ph.D. in modern Korean literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include coloniality; proletarian literature and art; visuality and the global Cold War. He is the author of Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia University Press, 2012), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the James B. Palais Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies for the best book in Korean studies in the year of its publication. Co-edited works include Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Film, and Art (special issue of Journal of Korean Studies, 2015); and Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), a finalist for the Daesan Literary Translation Prize. He is the translator of Panmunjom and Other Stories by Lee Ho-Chul (EastBridge, 2004; reissued under EastBridge imprint at Camphor Press, 2017). His current project, The Continuous War: Cultures of Division in Korea, is under contract at Columbia University Press.

Selected Publications

The Continuous War: Cultures of Division in Korea (Forthcoming)
Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (co-editor, Cornell, 2013)
Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia, 2012)