---

LLC Korea Forum welcomes papers to be considered for four panels that LLC Korea Forum is organizing for MLA 2027 in Los Angeles.

 

Panel 1. Guaranteed 

“Closed Open”: Visualizing Illness, Sensation, and the Sick Body in Korean Visual Culture

This panel invites papers that explore the intersection of medical humanities and cinema, with a particular focus on how illness, the body, and sensory experience are mediated through visual technologies. Taking inspiration from Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on illness (the experience of his heart transplant; L’intrus) as an irreversible opening—being “closed open”—this panel approaches the sick body not merely as a site of pathology or regulatory ideals of health, but as a locus of altered perception, vulnerability, and relational existence.

We aim to investigate the aesthetic possibilities of redefining the body through the representation of senses and sensorial experiences. By examining the visual historiography of medicine and the technological mediation of the flesh, this panel asks such questions as: How do South Korean bodily practices render the invisible visible against or beneath modernity and normativity? How do films and visual cultures render illness as a mode of being-in-the-world? In what ways do medical imaging, post-cinematic technologies, and sensory aesthetics transform narratives of health, disease, and care? How sick, contagious, or transformed bodies are re-presented in the post-cinema era?

By bringing together film studies, medical humanities, and Korean cultural studies, this panel aims to rethink illness not as an exception to normal life but as a critical condition that reshapes embodiment, perception, and human relations.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a one-page CV by March 15, 2026 to:

Hyun Seon Park (hpark63@gmu.edu) and Pil Ho Kim (kim.2736@osu.edu)

 

Panel 2 Guaranteed

Scriptscapes in Korean Literature, Media, and Culture

Foregrounding “scriptscape” as a keyword, the panel invites papers that explore how the visual form of writing, the co-presence of multiple scripts, and discourses on and practices of script materiality have shaped Korean literature, media, and culture. Scriptscape is tentatively defined as an environment in which intermixed writing systems and diverse forms of monoscript writing are encoded, organized, and curated on the page and across other written surfaces, including built environments, artistic objects, and digital interfaces. The concept prompts us to consider the interplay between semantic and nonsemantic dimensions of text in meaning-making, affective engagement, aesthetic signification, and performative practice and to relativize assumptions about the centrality of the Korean language and script. How, even before writing conveys meaning, do the shape, scale, spatial configuration, and other visual-material dimensions of texts position readers not merely as interpreters of linguistic signification but as viewers who recognize and process textual information and spectators who feel the effect of writing’s presence? In what ways do the creation of a new scriptscape and the interruption of a preexisting scriptscape communicate, sustain, or subvert value hierarchies? How do scriptscapes catalyze social inclusion and exclusion? What paratextual dimensions of scriptscapes can be uncovered? 

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

-    Mise-en-page in print (periodicals, books, event posters, etc.) and in manuscript

-    Paratexts (cover art, front matter, epigraphs, etc.)

-    Translation and transcription

-    Hangul-xenic mixed-script writing, including but not limited to Hangul mixed with sinography, Japanese scripts, the Latin alphabet, and premodern vernacular inscriptional methods across writing surfaces

-    Hangulized loanwords and deliberate mixing of Korean and non-Korean languages

-    Visual phrasing, paraphrasing, and representations of writing

 

The panel welcomes scholars working on moments of media-ecological change, the emergence of new textual and technological infrastructures, and the rethinking of relationships among language, literature, people, and territory. Please send a 250-word abstract and one-page C.V. to Si Nae Park (sinaepark@fas.harvard.edu) by March 15, 2026.

 

Panel 3 Non-guaranteed

Emancipatory Lament: Public Performances of Mourning in Modern and Contemporary Korea

 

This panel explores the agency of public and collective performances of mourning in modern and contemporary Korea. As seen throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, public performances of mourning have disrupted, altered, and recreated narratives of colonial and state violence in Korea. Moving beyond expressions of grief, what are the emancipatory possibilities of communal mourning, as imagined and exercised through music, literature, theater, media, and cultures of protest? How is lament, as an artistic and political force, capable of articulating conditions of oppression and mobilizing collective action? What is the relationship between individual and collective mourning? 

 

We welcome papers across disciplines in Korean Studies that consider the agentic possibilities and outcomes of mourning. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: protest cultures during South Korea’s turbulent period of democratization and the post-democratization period; narratives of state, colonial, and neocolonial violence and remembrance of the invisibilized dead; and embodied performances of collective memory on the peninsula and globally across the Korean diaspora.

 

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a one-page CV by March 15, 2026 to Ivanna Yi (isy4@cornell.edu).

 

 

Panel 4 Non-guaranteed

The Taste of Precarity: Gender, Global Korean Literature, and Food as Method

By treating food as both an aesthetic medium of knowledge production and an epistemology, this collaborative panel invites papers for a session of four presentations that examine how representations of the most mundane yet essential, and intensely political practices of food in global Korean literature generate critical insights into precarity associated with gender roles and identities, domesticity, (im)mobility, migration, body normativity, and embodied subjectivities. The panel especially welcomes interdisciplinary, comparative, transnational, and theoretically engaged contributions that examine all-encompassing literary genres including graphic novels, web novels, etc. that deepen our understanding of embodying values of food.

Studies of Korean food constitute a relatively recent scholarly trend, emerging alongside the global rise of Korean cuisine as a cultural commodity. This visibility has been shaped by the convergence of neoliberal business strategies and state soft-power diplomacy, popularizing transnational food media and personalities including television programs such as Culinary Class War and Please Take Care of My Refrigerator, food celebrities like Baek Jong-won, and mukbang(eating broadcasts). While these formations have attracted growing academic attention, literary engagements with food have remained relatively sparse and under-theorized. By defining “food literature” broadly as prose and poetry that either foreground food as a dominant theme or mobilize it as a medium to address various forms of gendered precarity, this panel raises several key questions: What can food literature reveal about the relationship between sensory experience and gender hegemony? How does it render the affective dimensions of hunger differently from other media? What insights do narratives of ethnic grocery stores and restaurants run by Korean immigrant families offer into gendered labor and familial dynamics? And can food literature generate new theoretical and conceptual tools for critiquing gender inequality?

We welcome papers examining literary works centering around dishes, sensorial affect, cooking, ingredients, ethnic restaurants, cooks and chefs, farmers and farming, and kitchen spaces that bring forth various levels of gendered precarity. In doing so, the panel gestures toward a literary-sensory epistemology of everyday life, care work, and embodied politics, the state, gendered practice of medicine and health, etc., offering a new framework for re-reading gender, domesticity, and power in Korean literature.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, 

-       gendered labor in domestic and commercial kitchens, 

-       the politics of (not)eating, 

-       food porn, 

-       ageing and care, 

-       aphrodisiacs,

-       food and illness, etc. 

 

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a one-page CV by March 15, 2026 to: Jooyeon Rhee (jxr5820@psu.edu).