This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I’m sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the “uncanny body politic,” the uncanny valley, “dystopian poetics,” what it means…[Read more]

This chapter analyzes activist narratives that foreground agroecological systems such as milpa farming. Here, corn has been most visibly used as a unifying metaphor for Mexican identity, while quelites (‘tender edible weeds’), which grow spontaneously at the feet of corn plants, have historically commanded much less attention. Recently, how…[Read more]

Compounding and derivation are frequent in many language families. As a consequence, words in different languages are often only partially cognate, sharing only a few but not all morphemes. While partial cognates do not constitute a problem for the phonological reconstruction of individual morphemes, they are problematic when it comes to…[Read more]

manual guide for the annotation of biographies

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities as viral origins—in the United States. Offering strategies for inclusion and for identifying tacit forms of misogynistic racism, this article analyzes the manifestation of the ideas of yellow peril and yel…[Read more]

Column on digital humanities and Jewish Studies, focusing on open data in digitized material.

El presente trabajo pretende probar que la fecha de nacimiento de la princesa Juana de Castilla, hija de Enrique IV y de Juana de Avís, habitualmente señalada el 28 de febrero de 1462, no se produjo este día, sino una semana después, el 7 de marzo del mismo año. La fecha de febrero procede de una fuente muy tardía, como son los A…[Read more]

El presente trabajo pretende probar que la fecha de nacimiento de la princesa Juana de Castilla, hija de Enrique IV y de Juana de Avís, habitualmente señalada el 28 de febrero de 1462, no se produjo este día, sino una semana después, el 7 de marzo del mismo año. La fecha de febrero procede de una fuente muy tardía, como son los A…[Read more]

One of the most astonishing scenes in Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quijote de la Mancha occurs when the priest and the barber, in order to counteract the mental deterioration of their friend Don Quijote, decide to burn his books about chivalry and knighthood, which, in their opinion, were driving Don Quijote to insanity.
The priest and the barber d…[Read more]

This article shows that James Joyce drew inspiration from the Philadelphia Inquirer for the period 1903-1904, particularly when writing the Aeolus episode of Ulysses. The 11 Jan 1903 Sunday edition of this newspaper is shown to have inspired the “crossed keys” of Leopold Bloom in the Aeolus episode, while leading Joyce to connect Shakespeare’s “…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

In “I, Stereotype,” Seo-Young Chu applies Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley not to robots but to a different species of humanoid artifact: stereotypes of the “yellow peril.” Through analyses of stories by Sax Rohmer, World War Two propaganda, and films from the Bond franchise, Chu investigates ways in which the logic of the uncanny valley has…[Read more]

Published in English Studies (2022)

Published in Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 80 (2020), 233-236.

Published in Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 76 (2016), 551-553.

Published in Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 76 (2016), 435–438.