The UVA East Asia Center will be hosting Hyun Seon Park, Assistant Professor of Korean at George Mason University, for a Speaker Series lecture "Cold War Modernism and Park Chan-wook's Rewrite of The Sympathizer."

In The Sympathizer, Park Chan-wook brings his unique political aesthetics and engagement with Cold War themes to the small TV screen. The series, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, weaves together the reflexive aesthetics of violence, the fabrication of war memories, and the visceral experience of dislocation. This talk by Dr. Hyun Seon Park will explore the critical entanglement of memory practices and Cold War modernism.

Hyun Seon Park is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University, specializing in Korean film history, Cold War culture, affect and memory, and gender politics. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, and has served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California’s Korean Studies Institute. She co-edited the “Cold War in Korean Cinemas” issue of the Journal of Korean Studies and guest-edited respectively “South Korean Cine-feminism on the Move” and “Cine-Gwangju: Postmemory of Democratic Movements in South Korean Films” for the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.