Ivanna Sang Een Yi

Overview

Ivanna Sang Een Yi is an Assistant Professor of Korea Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University and a scholar of Korean literature, culture, and performance. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. 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. She has published on subjects including contemporary Korean poetry, the relationship of p'ansori and the more-than-human world, and the storying of land in the Indigenous oral traditions of the Americas, in venues such as the Journal of Korean Studies, the Journal of World Literature, and The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature.  

Her current book project, Voices Inscribed by Land: Continuing Orality and the Environment in Korean Literature, examines the flourishing of Korean oral traditions such as p'ansori (epic dramatic storytelling) and muga (shamanic chant), through transformative encounters with writing, the environment, and recording technology. Centering decolonial thought and the more-than-human, 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 before and after the rise of global capitalism. She is also working on a second monograph project that examines the representation of more-than-human animals, interspecies communication, and multispecies relationships in Korean and Korean diasporic 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. She currently serves on the executive committee of the Korean Language, Literature, and Culture (LLC) Forum at the Modern Language Association, and her research projects have received support from the Korea Foundation, the Fulbright Institute of International Education, the Korea Institute at Harvard University, and the Cornell Society for the Humanities. In 2026-2027, she will be a Cornell Society for the Humanities Faculty Fellow.  

Research Focus

• Modern and Contemporary Korean Literature and Culture
• Late Chosŏn Oral Performance 
• Environmental Humanities
• Ecocriticism (Literature and Environment)
• Native and Indigenous Literatures and Cultures
• Korean American Literature
• Animal Studies
• Comparative and World Literatures