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Dear colleagues, 

 

I write to share the call below, for a Feb. 5-6, 2026 workshop at UCLA on post-liberation representations of the colonial period in Korean literature. For questions, please contact me (HEL163@pitt.edu) or my co-organizer, Chris Hanscom (hanscom@humnet.ucla.edu). 

 

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We seek contributions for presentation at an international workshop on “Cold War and Colonial Memories in Korean Literary Studies” to be held at UCLA on February 5-6, 2026.

 

The workshop inaugurates a multi-year project examining the impact of the Cold War on the production of culture in and about Korea, broadly construed. In light of the increasing attention paid over the last decade to cultural production in Cold War South Korea, we are particularly interested in how post-liberation representations of the colonial period in Korean literature and literary criticism, from 1945 to the present, may challenge the idea of the Cold War as a neat rupture from the period of colonial rule.

 

Focused on the way that literary and memory studies intersect in approaching the fluid boundary between political regimes in modern and contemporary Korea, we welcome submissions on a broad range of topics in Korean literary and cultural studies related to connections between colonial and Cold War logics. Guiding questions include:

 

- How do concepts of memory and postmemory—ideas developed in part through the study of world events contemporaneous to the Japanese colonial period—help us understand Cold War representations of colonial Korea? How has the colonial period been remembered by those who lived through it as well as those who did not, and what do these remembrances, in literary and critical form, tell us about how sense was made of the Cold War present? 

 

- Where do we see counter-narratives or counter-memories that challenge conventional ways of telling the history of both the colonial period and the Cold War?

 

- How have categories and priorities stemming from the Cold War structured what we think of as literary history?

 

- How might rethinking the temporality of both the colonial period and the Cold War enable us to think more expansively about knowledge produced in the field of Korean literary studies and in Korean studies at large?

 

We especially encourage colleagues working in Korea to submit proposals. Papers will be considered for publication in a special journal issue. Funding is available through the UCLA Korean Humanities Initiative for contributor travel to and participation in the workshop. Brief (350-words or less) proposals written in English may be submitted via email at coldwarmemory@proton.me by October 10, 2025. Any inquiries may be addressed to co-organizers HeeJin Lee (HEL163@pitt.edu) or Chris Hanscom (hanscom@humnet.ucla.edu).