Hwisang ChoAssistant Professor

Hwisang Cho specializes in cultural, intellectual, and literary history of Korea, comparative textual media, and global written culture. He earned his B.A. in Chinese literature from Korea University and his Ph.D. in Korean history from Columbia University. At Emory, Cho teaches courses on history of Korea (both modern and premodern), early modern East Asia, and epistolary culture.

His first book, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea, was published from the University of Washington Press in 2020. This book received two honorable mentions for the 28th Annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book (MLA) and the 2022 James B. Palais Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). It was also shortlisted for the 2021 DeLong Book History Book Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP).

His major work in progress is The Tales of the Master: Storytelling and the Uses of the Past in the Making of Korean Identities, a study of how the culture of storytelling about a historical personage and its manifestation in diverse material forms have influenced the formation and appropriation of self-identities of various communities in Korea from the late sixteenth century to the present.

Cho’s publications include a forthcoming essay on textual (im)materialities of Chosŏn funerary texts from the Journal of Korean Studies (Fall 2022), an article on the somatic origins of nonlinear textual forms in early modern Korea from the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (2022), an article on the poetry societies by secondary status groups in the late Chosŏn period in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (2020), an article on Chosŏn epistolary culture in the Journal of Asian Studies (2016) and an article on the problems of controlling emotions in early Chosŏn political and intellectual discourses in the Journal of Korean Studies (2015). Cho has also contributed chapters to the collections: Routledge Companion to Korean Literature (Routledge), Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton), Cultures of Yusin: The 1970s in South Korea (Michigan), and Epistolary Korea: Letters in the Communicative Space of the Chosŏn 1392–1910 (Columbia).

He is currently a senior fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) and an executive committee member of the Committee on Korean Studies (CKS), Association for Asian Studies.