Christopher P. Hanscom
Christopher P. Hanscom is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, and teaches courses on Korean literature and film. He is the author of The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (2013), a study of theories of language and modernist fiction in 1930s colonial Korea; co-editor of The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire (2016), a collection of essays offering a new perspective on the history of race and racial ideologies in modern East Asia; and co-editor of Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era (2013), a collection of translations of major literary critical and historical essays from the Korean colonial period.
Education
Hanscom received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, and his B.A. in English Literature from Cornell University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and has also taught at Dartmouth College.
Research
I am broadly interested in modern Korean literature and comparative literary studies. My specific research has dealt with the relationship between social and literary forms, with questions of colonial literature, with issues of race and empire, and with the relationship between scientific thinking and literature in the modern period.
Publications
BOOKS
The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire, co-edited with Dennis Washburn. University of Hawai’i Press, 2016.
The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea. Harvard University Asia Center, 2013.
Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era, co-edited with Youngju Ryu and Walter K. Lew. University of Hawai’i Press, 2013.
ARTICLES
“The Return of the Real in South Korean Fiction,” Acta Koreana 22.1 (June 2019): 1-16.
“Matters of Fact: Language, Science, and the Status of Truth in Late Colonial Korea,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 3.1 (2014): 27-50.
“Modernism, Hysteria, and the Colonial Double Bind: Pak T’aewŏn’s One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo” positions: asia critique 21.3 (Summer 2013): 607-636.
“Degrees of Difference: Rethinking the Transnational Turn in Korean Literary Studies,” PMLA 126.3 (May 2011): 651-657.
“Kim Yujŏng’s ‘Thoughts from a Sickbed’ and the Critique of Empiricist Discourse,” Journal of Korean Studies 14.1 (Fall 2009): 35-60.
