Overview
Ivanna Sang Een Yi is a scholar of Korean literature, culture, and performance. Her research focuses on the performative dimensions of living oral traditions as they interact with written literature and the environment from the late Chosŏn period to the present. Her current book project, Continuing Orality and the Environment in Korean Literature, examines the flourishing of Korean oral traditions such as p'ansori (epic dramatic storytelling) and sijo (lyric poetry) through transformative encounters with writing, the environment, and recording technology. The monograph engages Indigenous perspectives and theories from the Americas to illuminate ways in which land has been treated as a sentient interlocutor rather than a commodity by Korean singers and writers both before and after the rise of global capitalism. She is also working on a second monograph project which examines the representation of nonhuman animals and interspecies relationships in modern and contemporary Korean literature. Before coming to Cornell, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.
Research Focus
- Modern and Contemporary Korean Literature and Culture
- Late Chosŏn Oral Performance
- Environmental Humanities
- Ecocriticism (Literature and Environment)
- Native American Literatures and Cultures
- (Post)colonial Literatures
- Comparative and World Literatures
- Gender and Embodiment
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters:
"Communal Mourning and Contemporary Elegy in Korean Poetry: Kim Hyesoon's Autobiography of Death." Journal of World Literature 8 (2023) 62-78.
"Continuing Orality in Korean Literature: Opening a P'an for the Page," in Heekyoung Cho, ed., Routledge Companion to Korean Literature. London and N.Y.: Routledge, 2022, 371-382.
"Cartographies of the Voice: Storying the Land as Survivance in Native American Oral Traditions." Humanities 5, no. 3 (2016).
"Cartographies of the Voice: Storying the Land as Survivance in Native American Oral Traditions," in Karen Thornber and Thomas Havens, eds., Global Indigeneities and the Environment. Basel: MDPI, 2016. 206-221.
Other Publications:
"The Corporeality of Writing: Kim Hyesoon's Autobiography of Death." Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture 13 (2020), 371-381.
"Engaging P'ansori as a Living Organism," Korean Literature Now 47 (2020), 59-61.
Translations:
"Translations of Classical and Modern Sijo," Sijo: An International Journal of Poetry and Song 1 (2018), 33,39,48,71.
"River and Other Sijo Poems: Translations of Contemporary Sijo," Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture 4 (2011), 193-204.