Eastern, Slavic, and German Studies Faculty

Seung Hee Jeon

Associate Professor of the Practice, Korean

Photo of Seung Hee Jeon

Seung Hee Jeon

Ph.D.

Contact

Telephone: 617-552-2755

Email: seung.jeon@bc.edu

Education

  • B.A., Seoul National University
  • M.A., Seoul National University
  • Ph.D., Seoul National University
  • Ph.D., Harvard University

Courses

EALC2330: Contemporary Korean Literature and Culture
EALC4311-4312: Advanced Korean 1 & 2
EALC2311-2312: Intermediate Korean 1 & 2

Research Interests

Modern Korean and transnational literature and culture; Questions of truth in literary and cultural representations of war trauma and memory;
Post-colonial, post-capitalist, and post-anthropocentric literatures;
The intersection of literature and minorities;
Translation and cross-cultural communication

Curriculum Vitae

Profile

Seung Hee Jeon is an Associate Professor of the Practice and the Korean Coordinator at Boston College. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she moved to the Boston area to study literature at Harvard University in 1991. Jeon has published articles on trauma, memories, and truth in war, as well as on strategies to achieve peace in and around Korea. Her numerous translations include Conscience in Action: The Autobiography of Kim Dae-jung (Palgrave, 2018), the authoritative biography of the late South Korean president and 2000 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Jeon also translated Bang Hyeon-seok’s Time to Eat Lobster (MerwinAsia, 2016), a novella about the South Korean experience in the Vietnam War, and Shaheen Akhtar’s The Search (Asia, 2020), a novel about sexual slavery during and after the Bangladeshi War of Independence. In 2023, her translation of Minor Detail (Kang, 2023) by Adania Shibli was selected as one of 10 translations of the year by Hankyoreh newspaper. She has been honored with a Fulbright Grant, a Korea Foundation Fellowship, and two Daesan Foundation Translation grants. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The “Comfort Women” System and Agonistic Memory: A Search for Multi-Perspectival Truth in Recent Works of Art and Fiction in Korea. Prior to joining the BC faculty, Jeon taught at Seoul National University, KyungHee University, and Harvard University.

Selected Publications

  • “A Western Candy Box” by Yǒm Sang-sǒp, in Island Ablaze, edited by Jin-Kyung Lee. forthcoming: Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2024.
  • “How Contemporary Korean Literature Remembers the Korean War,” Guest Editor’s Introduction, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture, 16 (2023).
  • “Reflections on The Tasks of A Korean Literature Translator,” Euiyong Cho ed., Birth of K-Literature: How Translation Transformed Korean Literature into K-Literature (Gimmyoung Publishers, 2023).
  • “The Net” by Kim Namil, in Shuddhashar.com 32 (February 2023).
  • “Shaheen Akhtar’s The Search: Wartime Sexual Violence and Colonial and Postcolonial Modern History from the Perspective of Those Who Were Directly Affected,” Women’s Human Rights Institute of Korea ed., International Conference on Women’s Rights and Peace (Seoul: Women’s Human Rights Institute of Korea, 2022) 347-52.
  • “War Trauma, Memories and Truths: Representations of the Korean War in Pak Wan-so’s Writings and “Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the ‘Forgotten War’,” Critical Asian Studies, 42:4, December 2010.

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