Overview
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 and co-founded the Andrew Mellon Games & Culture Humanities Lab at Duke, both in 2018, and a founding board member of Duke Asian Alumni Alliance in 2019. She served as the Founding Director of Duke Engage Koreas in 2014 and co-directs this global service learning program based in Durham and Seoul working with refugee and migrant communities from around the world.
Interdisciplinary research expertise includes literary criticism and translation studies; film and media studies; post/colonial history and theory; gender and sexuality studies, focusing on comparative colonial legacies in global Asian, inter-Asian and transpacific historic and cultural encounters. Current research examines the contested politics of cultural memories across colonial and cold war violence and their lasting generational trauma in Asia and across the Pacific. Select and award-winning publications include Intimate Empire (Duke University Press, Korean translation from Somyŏng Press, Japanese translation from Jinbun Shobo, Russian translation forthcoming), Theorizing Colonial Cinema (in collaboration with philosopher Takushi Odagiri and film scholar Moonim Baek, Indiana University Press, Korean translation forthcoming), Antinomies of the Colonial Archive (in collaboration with historian Takashi Fujitani) and essays in Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Social Text, Sanghŏ Hakpo, Decolonial Manual, Cross-Currents, and various anthologies and collected volumes. With collaborators at the University of Netherlands, the Hague, and elsewhere, she is a developer of hybrid platform infinite strategy games (ISG) about historical conflicts. Her work has been recognized globally by multiple Fulbright grants, National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Korea Foundation, Japan Foundation, Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, Korean Literature Translation Institute, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University Office of the Provost, Duke University 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. She was a poetry editor in New York in her past life and holds a PhD from UCLA and BA from Duke University.