Nayoung Aimee Kwon

Nayoung Aimee Kwon (권나영　クォン　ナヨン　エイミー) is an award-winning multilingual author and a professor in Duke University's Asian & Middle Eastern Studies; Art, Art History, & Visual Studies; and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She is the Founding Director of Duke's Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program—the first of its kind in the American South—and a co-founder of Andrew Mellon Games & Culture Humanities Lab. She co-led the Duke Alumni Association initiative in establishing and serving as a founding board member of Duke’s inaugural Asian Alumni Alliance. In addition, she co-founded and co-directs Duke Engage Koreas, a critical refugee and global service learning program based in Durham and Seoul working with refugee and migrant communities from around the world. Her curatorial work includes film, VR, and art exhibitions developed in collaboration with various global and local filmmakers, artists, and activists at venues such as the Ruby Art Center, Screen/Society, Co-Lab VR Studio, and the Nasher Museum of Arts.

Interdisciplinary and transnational research expertise include literary and translation studies; film, digital and media studies; post/colonial history and theory; gender and sexuality studies, with historically, linguistically, and culturally informed focus on global Asian, inter-Asian and transpacific encounters. Current research examines contested politics, poetics, and images of cultural memories across transcolonial and cold war violence and their lasting generational reverberations in Asia and across the Pacific.  

Select and award-winning publications include Intimate Empire (Duke University Press), Theorizing Colonial Cinema (an international and multilingual collaboration with philosopher Takushi Odagiri and film theorist Moonim Baek, Indiana University Press), Antinomies of the Colonial Archive (an international and multilingual collaboration with historian Takashi Fujitani, University of California) and essays in multiple languages including Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Social Text, Sanghŏ Hakpo・ 상허학보, Decolonial Manual, 越境、Cross-Currents, and various anthologies and collected volumes. With international collaborators at the University of Netherlands, the Hague, and elsewhere, she is a developer of hybrid platform infinite strategy games (ISG) about cross-border historical conflicts and ethical intellectual collaborations.

Her work has been recognized globally and nationally by multiple Fulbright grants, National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Korea Foundation, Japan Foundation, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Academy of Korean Studies, Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, Korean Literature Translation Institute, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Asia-Pacific Studies Institute, Duke University Office of the Provost, Arts & Sciences Council, Trinity Office of the Dean, among others. She works in five languages and is a translator of literature and graphic novels from Korean and Japanese into English. In her past life, she was a poetry editor in New York and holds a PhD from UCLA and a BA from Duke University. She advises graduate—PhD and MA—students in multiple disciplines, departments, areas, and institutes across the university and beyond including English, Literature, AAHVS, Cinematic Arts, AMES/CAMEH, History, APSI, and International Comparative Studies.