Rethinking Korea Lecture Series: Dr. Kelly M. Rich

The Korean peninsula exerts an outsized influence on almost every facet of the world today. South Korea has emerged as one of the largest economies in the world, whose exports include everything from advanced technologies to popular culture. North Korea remains an authoritarian regime, whose efforts to challenge its international isolation threatens to ignite a global conflict. The peninsula is thus a critical engine of the global economy and a volatile flashpoint of geopolitical tensions. It is too important to be overlooked, let alone ignored.Now in its second year, the Rethinking Korea: New Perspectives on a Critical Region speakers series continues to invite an interdisciplinary roster of scholars to offer novel perspectives on Korea while situating its complex place within global developments. We invite speakers to share their work that will not only shed light on the internal dynamics and rich history of Korea but also explore the complex relationship between this critical region and the larger world.

This lecture will feature Dr. Kelly M. Rich, an Assistant Professor of English at Wellesley College. She is the author of States of Repair: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel (Oxford University Press, 2023), and is currently at work on her second book project, Children of Conflict: Cultural Formations of Transnational Adoption. With Nicole M. Rizzuto and Susan Zieger, she co-edited the MLA-prize winning collection The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern University Press, 2022). Her research has appeared in Representations, ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and has been supported by AAUW, Wellesley College, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

The speakers series is made possible by the South Korea Initiative Fund, which is dedicated to helping establish an institutional commitment to Korean Studies at Northeastern, offering financial support to students studying or working in Korea, and educating the community about important issues regarding Korea in the world.

Host or Publisher Northeastern University Asian Studies Program