Ksenia Chizhova

I work on the history of emotions, family, and scriptural practices in Korea, from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. My first manuscript, Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday, looks into the rise and fall of the lineage novel (kamun sosŏl), which narrated the interstices of Korea’s kinship system and foregrounded the genealogical subject—a structure of identity defined by kinship obligation and understood as socialization of the emotional self. Lineage novels, which constituted the core of elite vernacular Korean literature and circulated between the late 17^th and early 20^th centuries, configure Korean kinship as a series of clashes between genders and generations, which produce unruly, violent emotions.

My ongoing interest in vernacular Korean calligraphy prompted me to explore the embodied aspect of elite women’s scriptural practices in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910), and the reconceptualization of these practices as they transitioned through various institutions and ideologies in the twentieth century. Now in progress, my second manuscript project traces the shifts in contexts and infrastructure of graphic media that shaped the visual aesthetics of the Korean script, from the 17^th century calligraphic practice to the contemporary fonts and graphic design in the two Koreas.

At Princeton, I tech a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses that intersect the study of Korea with the theoretical methodologies of cultural criticism.

Prior to joining Princeton in 2016, I spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Korea Institute of Australian National University after receiving my Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2015.

Courses taught:

Graduate:

• EAS 574 Presentiments: Towards Modern Korean Literature

Undergraduate: 

• EAS 372/ COM 386   Strange Korean Families
• EAS 369/COM 358    Korean Travel Narratives
• EAS 216    Writing and Culture of Premodern Korea
• EAS 364/GSS 405    Queens, Courtesans, Nuns, and Workers: Korean Women in History
• EAS 300    Junior Seminar
• HUM 234/EAS 234    East Asian Humanities II: Traditions and Transformations

Publications List: 

Peer reviewed articles:

• “Vernacular Itineraries: Korean Letters from Family to National Archive,” Journal of Korean Studies 24.2 (2019).
• "Bodies of Texts: Women Calligraphers and the Elite Vernacular Culture of Late Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910),” The Journal of Asian Studies 77.1 (2018): 59-81.

Book Chapters:

• “Growing Trees and Dead Branches: Kinship Imagination and the Beginning of Early Modern Vernacular Korean Literature,” in How Literatures Begin, ed. Joel Lande and Denis Feeney (forthcoming with Princeton University Press).
• "The Pledge at the Banquet of Moon-Gazing Pavilion: Gender, Fiction and the Discourse of Emotion,” in An Anthology of Premodern Korean Prose: Literary Selections from the Tenth to the Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Michael J. Pettid, Gregory N. Evon and Chan E. Park (Columbia University Press, 2018), 123-132.

Editorial Work:

“Textual Materiality in Korea: Premodern to Postmodern.” A special issue of the Journal of Korean Studies (October 2022), co-edited with Olga Fedorenko (Anthropology, Seoul National University).

Essays:

“Kinship in the Bedroom: The Remarkable Reunion of Jade Mandarin Ducks,” Korean Literature Now 47 (March 2020)