Education

M.A., Sogang University, 2017
B.A., Sogang University, 2015

Bio

Hyunjoo Yu is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, body, affect, and community care in the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. Her current project, “Infectious Feelings” provides a critique of sentimentalism as a modality of colonial liberalism by which racialized affects are pathologized and exploited for white racist pleasure. Her research mines for the responses of women writers of color toward such cultural tendencies with sketches of unlikely intimacies among visually different peoples, and underscores the political currency of those responses with the iconography of the “perilous Asiatics” as the cultural backdrop. Her works on Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper were presented at the 2021 SSAWW conference and the 2022 C19, and her work on Eudora Welty, blues aesthetics, and white supremacy appeared in Mississippi Quarterly. Besides her current project, she also spoke at on-campus symposiums about anti-Asian violence and racist harassment in college classrooms. She is a recipient of TAMU Graduate and Professional School’s 2022 Dissertation Fellowship and a winner of the 2022 Fasken Award and the 2022 Distinguished Graduate Student Award.

Research Interests

• American Literature and Culture

Accomplishments

• “’Powerhouse is Playing’ with Languages.” Mississippi Quarterly, Forthcoming.
• Hamlin Hill Essay Prize in Historical Literary Studies, Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Texas A&M University, 2020.
• Graduate Assistant, Texas A&M University Department of English, 2018-Present.