The 2025-2026 annual Comaprative Literature Conference will include two main events, a symposium on global Asian photography in the early fall of 2025 and a graduate symposium in spring 2026. 

 

Transnationalism as a methodological approach, a circulation of images/objects, and a distributed network of scholars has been an important recent development in the field of Korean Studies. This coincides with the truly world-wide interests in Korean culture today, felt in South Carolina as much as elsewhere. To be held August 22-23, 2025 at the University of South Carolina, this two-day symposium on photography and Korean visual culture will reflect, and build on, this twofold current in the studies of Korea and the studies of global visual culture in North America. It also seeks to reconceptualize multiple temporalities of global modernity by exploring photographic image-making and image-circulation and compel decolonial imaginations from a transnational “Korean” perspective. This in-person interdisciplinary conference will bring together eight scholars specializing in visual culture, Korean Studies, art history, comparative literature, Asian studies, and related fields, as we collectively explore images of, from, and beyond the Korean peninsula. The conference will consist of three panels, a roundtable discussion, and a visit to USC’s Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) to explore footage from the Korean War. 

 

The symposium is sponsored by the Program in Comparative Literature, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and the North Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies. 

 

Speakers: