Janet Poole

Janet Poole's research and teaching interests lie in aesthetics in the broad context of colonialism and modernity, in history and theories of translation, and in the creative practice of literary translation. Her book, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea, writes the creative works of Korea’s writers into the history of global modernism, and colonialism into the history of fascism, through an exploration of the writings of poets, essay writers, fiction writers and philosophers from the final years of the Japanese empire. It won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (2015) and Honorable Mention for the Association of Asian Studies James B. Palais Prize (2016). The book was the result of a decade spent thinking about the possibilities of art under the harshest of political regimes, the shaping power of colonial fascism and the creative responses that emerged from its midst. A discussion of the book can be found in an episode of the Korea and the World podcast. A dedicated literary translator, Poole has translated many works by the mid-twentieth century writer Yi T’aejun. A collection of his anecdotal essays written during the Asia-Pacific War was published as Eastern Sentiments by Columbia University Press in 2009 and offers a quirky take on everyday life in 1930s Korea: wistful, nostalgic and violently colonial. A selection of Yi's short stories written between 1925 and 1950, by which time he had moved to North Korea, appeared as Dust and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2018). The latter was awarded a residency fellowship from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Her most recent project, “Going North and the History of Korean Modernism,” looks at the writings of Korea’s modernist writers and artists who crossed the 38th parallel into what was to become the Democratic People’s Republic in the late 1940s. A study of decolonization as a literary event, the project was awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant in 2017 and a Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship in 2020. Poole is currently translating the short fiction of another mid-century writer, Ch’oe Myŏngik, who was born and based in Pyongyang throughout his career.