Keynotes and a Special Talk

Josephine Nock-Hee Park is a member of the faculty steering committee of the Asian American Studies Program and the executive committee of the Kim Center for Korean Studies. She specializes in modern and contemporary American literature and culture, with an emphasis on American poetry and Asian American literature. She is the author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford 2008), which reads a modern history of American literary alliances with East Asia and was awarded the Literary Book Award by the Association for Asian American Studies, and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (Oxford 2016), which examines Asian American subjectivities shaped by wartime alliances in Korea and Vietnam, as well as an exploratory short book titled Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Black and White (Cambridge Elements 2023). She is the co-editor of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930-1965 (Cambridge 2021), with Victor Bascara, and Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound's Contemporaneity (Bloomsbury 2016), with Paul Stasi. She has served on the editorial boards of American Literature, The Journal of Asian American Studies, PMLA, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

Christopher Bush (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA) is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literary Studies and codirects the Global Avant-garde and Modernist Studies graduate cluster. His research and teaching focus on transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to literary modernisms, especially the connections between European and East Asian avant-gardes, aesthetic theory, and media. He is currently completing a book, for Columbia University Press, on the modernist haiku as world literature, and has recently published articles in Esprit créateur, T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, and the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition catalog. Previous publications include Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford, 2010); a collaborative translation and critical edition of Victor Segalen’s Stèles (Wesleyan, 2007); articles in such journals as Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, and Representations; and essays in such edited volumes as 1913: The Year of French Modernism (Manchester, 2020),  A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (Columbia, 2016), Ezra Pound in the Present (Bloomsbury, 2016), Modernism and Theory: A Handbook of Modernist Studies (Blackwell, 2013), and Drawing from Life (Mississippi, 2013). He was coeditor of the journal Modernism/modernity from 2016 to 2021 and continues to serve on its editorial board. Academic honors include funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright research grant, the Princeton Society of Fellows, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. He teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, primarily focused on modernist literatures of the early twentieth century, the historical avant-gardes, and critical theory, including “The Avant-gardes in the World,” “Proust and the Arts,” “Time, History, Media: Chris Marker,” “The Surreal World,” and “Bergsonism and Global Modernism.” He is the current Chair of the Department of French and Italian.

Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is the author of The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-making the Reader (2024), Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (2017), The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009), British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (1997), and co-author of International PEN: An Illustrated History (Interlink/Thames & Hudson, 2021). He is currently working on a book about re-imagining a literary education in the age of artificial intelligence.