A scholar of Asian Gothic and transnational aesthetics reorienting established understandings of modernity, empathy, and the sublime through Korean literature and visual culture.
I work across academic, institutional, and public spaces to rethink how literature travels, transforms, and circulates across cultures.
My research develops the concept of Gothic Empathy—my PhD topic—which examines how affect, finitude, and the aesthetics of terror and horror are reimagined by artful writers across cultural and historical contexts.
My work bridges academic scholarship and curatorial practice. Through exhibitions, public humanities initiatives, and cross-cultural literary collaborations across Europe and Asia, I explore how Gothic forms circulate, transform, and acquire new political and emotional meanings beyond their European origins. I aim to establish Asian Gothic not as a regional variant of Gothic studies, but as a critical framework that offers a new perspective on the limits of Enlightenment reason.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS University of London (2026–present)
Lecturer in Korean
Department of Foreign Languages, Kingston Language Scheme, Kingston University (2019–2025)
Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing, Kingston University London
M.A. in English Literature, University of Exeter
M.A. in English Literature, Kyung Hee University
B.A. in English, Kyung Hee University
Gothic Empathy reconsiders the relationship between Gothic aesthetics and Enlightenment thought by tracing the affective structures that underlie modern subjectivity. While Gothic literature has often been positioned as the “dark double” of rational modernity, this book argues that terror, sympathy, and the sublime were never external to Enlightenment reason but constitutive of it.
Through a sustained engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, sympathy discourse, and Gothic fiction, the study develops the concept of Gothic Empathy to describe how fear and affective identification operate as modes of negotiating the limits of rational autonomy. Rather than treating Gothic as a marginal genre of excess, the book demonstrates that it exposes the unstable emotional foundations of modern ethical and aesthetic thought.