Jini Kim Watson
Assistant Professor of English, Comparative LiteraturePh.D. 2006 (Literature) Duke University; B.A. 1997 (English, Hons I) University of Queensland; B.P.D. 1994 (Architecture) University of Melbourne
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Jini Kim Watson received her PhD in Literature from Duke University in 2006 and since then has taught postcolonial theory and literature at NYU. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the Asia-Pacific, comparative modernities, theories of architecture and urbanism, and questions of political modernity. She has published on postcolonial East and Southeast Asia in the journals Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary Literature and Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, and is the author of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). She is currently working on a new book project which is concerned with the problem of authoritarianism in postcolonial literature and theory.
Jini regularly teaches undergraduate classes on Asia-Pacific literature, film and culture, as well as an introductory course in postcolonial studies (with Professor Toral Gajarawala). Her recent graduate seminars have included “Theories of Architecture and Space”, “Place, Space and the Postcolonial” and “Literary Dictatorships”. Alongside literary and cinematic texts, these classes have included architectural and Marxist theory, philosophies of place and space, as well as readings from political theory and anthropology.
Areas of Research/Interest
Asia-Pacific literature and cultural studies; postcolonial studies; spatial and architectural
theory; comparative modernities; feminist and critical theory
External Affiliations
Modern Language Association; American Comparative Literature Association
Fellowships/Honors
Faculty Fellow, NYU Humanities Initiative 2011-2012;
Bass Instructorship (Duke) 2004-05; Korea Foundation Fellowship, 2002; Janet B. Chiang
Award (Duke) 2001; University Medal (U of Queensland) 1997.
Publications
The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
“Authoritarianism, Cosmopolitanism, Allegory.” ARIEL 42.1 (2011): 85-106.
“A Room in the City: Woman, Interiority and Postcolonial Korean Fiction.” The Domestic Space Reader. Forthcoming. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
“Seoul and Singapore as ‘New Asian Cities’: Literature, Urban Transformation and the Concentricity of Power.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 19.1 (2011).
“The Way Ahead: The Politics and Poetics of Singapore’s Developmental Landscape.” Contemporary Literature 49.4 (Winter 2008): 683-711.
"Imperial Mimicry, Modernisation Theory and the Contradictions of Postcolonial South Korea." Postcolonial Studies 10.2 (2007): 171-190.
