[KS] Subject: [CFP] MLA 2027, LLC Korea Forum

[Jooyeon Rhee]

*Subject: [KS] [CFP] MLA 2027, LLC Korea Forum*



Dear Korean Studies Colleagues,



We welcome papers to be considered for four panels that LLC Korea Forum is
organizing for MLA 2027 in Los Angeles.



Panel 1. Guaranteed

*“Closed Open”: Visualizing Illness, Sensation, and the Sick Body in Korean
Visual Culture*

This panel invites papers that explore the intersection of medical
humanities and cinema, with a particular focus on how illness, the body,
and sensory experience are mediated through visual technologies. Taking
inspiration from Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on illness (the experience of
his heart transplant; *L’intrus)* as an irreversible opening—being “closed
open”—this panel approaches the sick body not merely as a site of pathology
or regulatory ideals of health, but as a locus of altered perception,
vulnerability, and relational existence.

We aim to investigate the aesthetic possibilities of redefining the body
through the representation of senses and sensorial experiences. By
examining the visual historiography of medicine and the technological
mediation of the flesh, this panel asks such questions as: How do South
Korean bodily practices render the invisible visible against or beneath
modernity and normativity? How do films and visual cultures render illness
as a mode of *being-in-the-world*? In what ways do medical imaging,
post-cinematic technologies, and sensory aesthetics transform narratives of
health, disease, and care? How sick, contagious, or transformed bodies are
re-presented in the post-cinema era?

By bringing together film studies, medical humanities, and Korean cultural
studies, this panel aims to rethink illness not as an exception to normal
life but as a critical condition that reshapes embodiment, perception, and
human relations.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a one-page CV by March 15, 2026 to:

Hyun Seon Park (hpark63 at gmu.edu) and Pil Ho Kim (kim.2736 at osu.edu)



Panel 2 Guaranteed

*Scriptscapes in Korean Literature, Media, and Culture*

Foregrounding “scriptscape” as a keyword, the panel invites papers that
explore how the visual form of writing, the co-presence of multiple
scripts, and discourses on and practices of script materiality have shaped
Korean literature, media, and culture. Scriptscape is tentatively defined as
 an environment in which intermixed writing systems and diverse forms of
monoscript writing are encoded, organized, and curated on the page and
across other written surfaces, including built environments, artistic
objects, and digital interfaces. The concept prompts us to consider the
interplay between semantic and nonsemantic dimensions of text in
meaning-making, affective engagement, aesthetic signification, and
performative practice and to relativize assumptions about the centrality of
the Korean language and script. How, even before writing conveys meaning,
do the shape, scale, spatial configuration, and other visual-material
dimensions of texts position readers not merely as interpreters of
linguistic signification but as viewers who recognize and process textual
information and spectators who feel the effect of writing’s presence? In
what ways do the creation of a new scriptscape and the interruption of a
preexisting scriptscape communicate, sustain, or subvert value hierarchies?
How do scriptscapes catalyze social inclusion and exclusion? What
paratextual dimensions of scriptscapes can be uncovered?

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

-     Mise-en-page in print (periodicals, books, event posters, etc.) and
in manuscript

-     Paratexts (cover art, front matter, epigraphs, etc.)

-     Translation and transcription

-     Hangul-xenic mixed-script writing, including but not limited to
Hangul mixed with sinography, Japanese scripts, the Latin alphabet, and
premodern vernacular inscriptional methods across writing surfaces

-     Hangulized loanwords and deliberate mixing of Korean and non-Korean
languages

-     Visual phrasing, paraphrasing, and representations of writing



The panel welcomes scholars working on moments of media-ecological change,
the emergence of new textual and technological infrastructures, and the
rethinking of relationships among language, literature, people, and
territory. Please send a 250-word abstract and one-page C.V. to Si Nae Park
(sinaepark at fas.harvard.edu) by March 15, 2026.



Panel 3 Non-guaranteed

*Emancipatory Lament: Public Performances of Mourning in Modern and
Contemporary Korea*



This panel explores the agency of public and collective performances of
mourning in modern and contemporary Korea. As seen throughout the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, public performances of mourning have disrupted,
altered, and recreated narratives of colonial and state violence in Korea.
Moving beyond expressions of grief, what are the emancipatory possibilities
of communal mourning, as imagined and exercised through music, literature,
theater, media, and cultures of protest? How is lament, as an artistic and
political force, capable of articulating conditions of oppression and
mobilizing collective action? What is the relationship between individual
and collective mourning?



We welcome papers across disciplines in Korean Studies that consider the
agentic possibilities and outcomes of mourning. Possible topics include,
but are not limited to: protest cultures during South Korea’s turbulent
period of democratization and the post-democratization period; narratives
of state, colonial, and neocolonial violence and remembrance of the
invisibilized dead; and embodied performances of collective memory on the
peninsula and globally across the Korean diaspora.



Please submit a 250-word abstract and a one-page CV by March 15, 2026 to
Ivanna Yi (isy4 at cornell.edu).





Panel 4 Non-guaranteed

*The Taste of Precarity: Gender, Global Korean Literature, and Food as
Method*

By treating food as both an aesthetic medium of knowledge production and an
epistemology, this collaborative panel invites papers for a session of four
presentations that examine how representations of the most mundane yet
essential, and intensely political practices of food in global Korean
literature generate critical insights into precarity associated with gender
roles and identities, domesticity, (im)mobility, migration, body
normativity, and embodied subjectivities. The panel especially welcomes
interdisciplinary, comparative, transnational, and theoretically engaged
contributions that examine all-encompassing literary genres including
graphic novels, web novels, etc. that deepen our understanding of embodying
values of food.

Studies of Korean food constitute a relatively recent scholarly trend,
emerging alongside the global rise of Korean cuisine as a cultural
commodity. This visibility has been shaped by the convergence of neoliberal
business strategies and state soft-power diplomacy, popularizing
transnational food media and personalities including television programs
such as *Culinary Class War* and *Please Take Care of My Refrigerator*,
food celebrities like Baek Jong-won, and *mukbang*(eating broadcasts).
While these formations have attracted growing academic attention, literary
engagements with food have remained relatively sparse and under-theorized.
By defining “food literature” broadly as prose and poetry that either
foreground food as a dominant theme or mobilize it as a medium to address
various forms of gendered precarity, this panel raises several key
questions: What can food literature reveal about the relationship between
sensory experience and gender hegemony? How does it render the affective
dimensions of hunger differently from other media? What insights do
narratives of ethnic grocery stores and restaurants run by Korean immigrant
families offer into gendered labor and familial dynamics? And can food
literature generate new theoretical and conceptual tools for critiquing
gender inequality?

We welcome papers examining literary works centering around dishes,
sensorial affect, cooking, ingredients, ethnic restaurants, cooks and
chefs, farmers and farming, and kitchen spaces that bring forth various
levels of gendered precarity. In doing so, the panel gestures toward a
*literary-sensory
epistemology* of everyday life, care work, and embodied politics, the
state, gendered practice of medicine and health, etc., offering a new
framework for re-reading gender, domesticity, and power in Korean
literature.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to,

-       gendered labor in domestic and commercial kitchens,

-       the politics of (not)eating,

-       food porn,

-       ageing and care,

-       aphrodisiacs,

-       food and illness, etc.



Please submit a 250-word abstract and a one-page CV by March 15, 2026
to: Jooyeon
Rhee (jxr5820 at psu.edu).
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