South Korean science fiction writers Kim Bo-Young (On the Origin of Species and Other Stories) and Bora Chung (Cursed Bunny) are rewriting the rules of science fiction and fantasy through works that are increasingly recognized in both South Korea and the English-speaking world. This evening is an opportunity to meet them both along with Sunyoung Park, USC professor of Korean culture and gender studies, and Seoyeon Lee, a scholar of East Asian science fiction. The special event showcases the works of Kim and Chung all the while engaging the two authors in a conversation about new millennium science fiction and the place of women in its globally expanding universe.

Bora Chung is a writer of science fiction and generally unrealistic stories. Chung currently teaches Russian language and literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean. She has published three novels and three books of collected short stories in Korean.

Bo-Young Kim won the inaugural Korean Science & Technology Creative Writing Award with her first published novella in 2004 and has gone on to win the annual South Korean SF Novel Award three times. In addition to writing, she regularly serves as a lecturer, juror, and editor of sci-fi anthologies, and served as a consultant to Parasite director Bong Joon Ho’s earlier sci-fi film Snowpiercer. She has novellas forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2021. She lives in Gangwon Province, South Korea, with her family.

Seoyeon Lee is a second-year Ph.D. student majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. She graduated from Ewha Womans University with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature. Her current research centers on science fiction literature in Korea, mainland China, and Sinophone worlds. She is particularly interested in the intersection of contemporary Korean and Chinese science fiction in the works of women writers while exploring possibilities of imagining an alternative world beyond the boundaries of gender and race.

Sunyoung Park is an associate professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the editor of Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction (Kaya Press, 2019), and author of The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) and the editor and translator of On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea (Cornell East Asian Series, 2010). Her current projects include a monograph on science fiction and the politics of modernization in South Korea and a collection of critical essays titled Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea (University of Michigan Press, 2019).