PhD Candidate. MA (2006) Dartmouth College. BA (2004)Mount Holyoke College
Graduating from Mount Holyoke College with a major in English and a minor in Asian Studies in 2004, I enrolled in Dartmouth College's Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program in 2005, where I pursued a concentration in Cultural Studies. For my cumulative thesis, I explored contemporary representations of the Pacific War (1932-1945) "comfort women" through analyses of testimonies, literature, and scholarship. While ongoing international discourses tend to refer to these women as either voluntary prostitutes or forced sexual slaves, I problematize this dichotomy as playing into underlying ideologies of purity and nationalism as well as presenting a monolithic "model victim" metanarrative which privileges one type of victim over others. Now, as a doctoral student in UMD's Women's Studies department, I am interested in furthering my previous research on the "comfort women" by considering transnational sociolegal histories of East Asian prostitutes in nineteenth-century America in addition to incorporating early modern Japanese and Korean feminist discourses.
Research Interest:
Comfort women, Cultural studies, Japanese and Korean feminist discourse