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Faculty Spotlight
Professor Josephine Park
Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies.
Josephine Park received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 2003 from University of California, Berkeley. She joined the Penn faculty in 2003.
Her book, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics was published in January 2008, Oxford University Press.
Walt Whitman called the Orient "The Past! the Past! the Past!" but
East Asia was remarkably present for the United States in the twentieth century. Apparitions of Asia reads American literary expressions of a century of U.S.-East Asian alliances in which the Far East is imagined as near and
contemporary. Commercial and political bridges across the Pacific
generated American literary fantasies of ethical and spiritual accord;
Apparitions of Asia examines American bards who capitalized on these ties and interrogates the price of such intimacies for Asian American poets.
Professor Park is the midst of organizing a mini-conference on Asian American Literature. This will be open to the public and is tentatively scheduled for April 2008.
Her new research examines the figure of the nobody in Asian American
literature by analyzing enemy subjectivities in twentieth-century
conflicts between the United States and East Asia.
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