I am a scholar of modern Korean literature with research interests broadly centered on the expressions of social criticism, ethics, and resistance found in women's literature's ecological imaginations.

I am currently a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows at the University of Southern California and received my PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Irvine in July, 2025.

My current book project, tentatively titled Writing the Korean Madwoman: Reading the Human in Modern Korean Women's Literature, puts a spin on the popular criticism of women's literature as too intimate, personal and deviating from homogenized national (and often masculine) histories by underscoring the lived and gendered experiences as essential method of writing that is captured through literary madness. In my book, I examine how Korean women writers—including Bae Suah, Han Kang, and O Chŏng-hŭi—transformed madness from recurring theme into deliberate literary strategy and feminist method from the 1950s to 2010s, reclaiming memories, experiences, and identities co-opted by patriarchal nationalism and developmentalism. I argue that these writers reclaim the "Korean madwoman" or mich'innyŏn—a publicly visible, vocal, and generative figure—from the US-European "madwoman in the attic" by producing their own discourse and genealogy, an act I define as discursive defiance and decoloniality. They mobilize madness not only as metaphor for collective trauma but as somatically expressed tool for social critique, challenging the silence and conformity imposed by Korea's heteronormative ethnonationalism while reimagining subjectivity and rethinking what it means to be human.

I can be reached at mwcho1@uci.edu.