Overview
Adhy Kim (he/they)* is an assistant professor in the Literatures in English Department and the Asian American Studies Program. His research is situated at the intersection of Asian and Asian American literary studies, with a focus on Korea, Japan, and their diasporas. Adhy’s book project, Speculative Natural Histories, examines the tightly connected and contested relationship between geopolitical realism and literary speculation in post-1945 Northeast Asian/American cultural production. Arguing that literature and film can both reveal and rethink the hegemonic geopolitical narratives embedded in South Korean, Japanese, and American memoryscapes like museums, peace parks, eco-reserves, and memorials, Speculative Natural Histories tracks how Asian/Americans deploy transhistorical and transhemispheric imaginaries in their search for alternative spatiotemporal philosophies from within the grip of U.S.-led security alliances, inter-capitalist normalizations, and colonial occupations.
More generally, Adhy is interested in how imperialism, capitalism, and militarism in Asia and the United States produce transnational and multilingual formations in twentieth-century Asian/American literatures. Their scholarship may be in found in Comparative Literature Studies and Mosaic, among other venues, and is forthcoming in positions: asia critique and the edited volume Techno-Orientalism II (Rutgers University Press). His English translation of the novel Blood and Bones (chi to hone) by the Zainichi Korean writer Yang Seok-il was published in 2022.
*For the curious, Adhy’s name is an acronym of the first letters of his English and Korean names. Please feel free to pronounce it as you would the name “Addy.”