유타대학교 아시아캠퍼스
(University of Utah - Asia Campus)

After earning my PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Utah in December 2024, I was given the opportunity to travel to the U’s Asia campus in Songdo, South Korea. Being an Assistant Professor (Limited-Term Lecturer) of English at the UAC was an invaluable experience, one I’ll be forever grateful for on both personal and professional levels. I had the honor of teaching the campus’s first Creative Writing class and got to work side by side with incredible Writing & Rhetoric department faculty as well as my colleagues in other departments.

Teaching to a room filled with multilingual learners is a humbling experience. Many of my students were learning English as their second, third, or even fourth language. Their attunement to the way language works, how divergent alphabets translate and transgress, and the expressive capacities of polyglotism led to many compelling in-class discussions, and reading their work refreshed my own relationship with the English language. Our Introduction to Creative Writing class centered on texts with bilingual Hangeul-English elements, including Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, Seo Jimin’s Ossia, and Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom’s graphic memoir Palimpsest. Reading these texts together allowed for a fuller view of these works, as we were able to parse what were direct translations, what idioms could not be translated, and what elements of the text were fruitfully obscured to monolingual readers.

The UAC is part of a consortium of colleges from the US and Europe, the Incheon Global Campus. Students account for significant portion of the population of Songdo, and it’s common to run into them while navigating Triple Street (the vast shopping center across the street), traversing the parks (which account for about a third of the island’s space), or boarding the train to Seoul. It’s a close-knit community, and my UAC students were always eager to participate in extracurricular events and engage with their peers beyond the confines of their classrooms. A group of my students had the pleasure of meeting a Go Learn group of adult learners visiting from the States, and it was a pleasure watching them intuitively pair off with these travelers to share about their UAC experiences, Korean culture, and their personal backgrounds.

South Korea is roughly the size of the state of Indiana, a geographic fact that was difficult for me to comprehend until I took the KTX fast train to Busan and was on the opposite end of the country within a couple of hours.

I spent much of my off-campus time exploring Seoul and the islands off Incheon’s coast, including Wolmido, a semi-abandoned theme park and elaborate garden that was built over a site decimated by napalm bombings during the Incheon landing.

Flights between South Korea and Japan are about as frequent (and far less expensive) as flights between New York City and Boston, so I was able to spend time in Fukuoka and Hiroshima, as well.

My time in Asia had a significant impact on my creative work. Songdo is a unique place. The island was built from reclaimed land raised out of the Yellow Sea about fifteen years ago and designed to be a smart city. The trees are short, and the buildings, largely empty, are very tall. Like most of the Seoul metro-area, a vast network of underground shopping centers, arcades, and transit hubs teems below the surface. It’s fertile ground for writing. While at the UAC I began experimenting with sijos, a traditional Korean verse form, and am working on a collection of visual sijos entitled Paper Cities that explores urban construction and the legacy of chemical warfare.

I’m grateful to my colleagues and students at the UAC, and for my mentors in the English department on main campus for giving me this incredible opportunity. 감사합니다