Dr. Youngju Ryu

Biography

Youngju Ryu is a Professor of Korean Literature specializing in modern Korean literature. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California-Los Angeles in 2006. Her research interests encompass the politics of aesthetics, protest cultures, authoritarianism, and mediatized publics in modern Korea. Ryu has authored the book 'Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s Korea', published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2016, which was selected as one of the Best Books of 2016 by Foreign Affairs and won the 2018 Association for Asian Studies James Palais Book Prize. She edited the volume 'Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s', released by the University of Michigan Press in 2018, which further explores the authoritarian period in South Korea. Her publications cover various topics including gendering Korea’s Vietnam War film, moral dramas of inter-Korean reconciliation, and the works of the controversial poet Kim Chi-ha. Ryu co-edits a book series titled 'Perspectives on Contemporary Korea', also published by the University of Michigan Press. Currently, she is working on a book that reexamines the history of South Korea’s democratization movement from the 1960s to the 2010s through an analytical lens of media, which includes post-broadcast formats like podcasts. Her teaching spans undergraduate courses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Korea, as well as graduate courses on Asian literature.

Research Interests

Courses