Hwisang ChoFaculty Fellow

Hwisang Cho specializes in the 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 (2001) and his Ph.D. in Korean history from Columbia University (2010). His major work-in-progress is  Irresistible Fabulation: Moral Imagination and Storytelling in Korean Confucian Tradition, 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. Unraveling the formation of Korean Confucian tradition as the emergence of a new kind of storytelling practices, this project aims to offer a revisionist intellectual history through methods derived from narratology, anthropological history, and such innovative theoretical angles as “critical fabulation” and “speculative fabulation.”  

During his time at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry as a Faculty Fellow, Cho will work on this book project. While exploring the diverse narrative strategies and media forms that the master’s life stories took, this project will demonstrate how a new moral imagination triggered by sociopolitical changes brought about the demand for a new kind of story in Korea, starting in the sixteenth century.