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Seung-hwan Shin

  • Teaching Associate Professor of Korean Studies; Film and Media Studies
  • Estuary: Counter history, transnational cinema, genre imagination, media ecology

Courses Taught

University of Pittsburgh

  • Intro to Korean Culture and Civilization (KOREAN 0007)

  • Asia Pop: Special Topics in East Asian Popular Culture (CHIN/JPNSE/KOREAN 0010)

  • Intro to Korea Through Films (KOREAN 0075/FMST 1240)

  • Intro to Modern Korean Literature (KOREAN 0084)

  • World of Korea: Past and Present (KOREAN 1070)

  • Contemporary Korean Culture (KOREAN 1080)

  • Intro to East Asian Cinema (CHIN/JPNSE/KOREAN 1085/FMST 1200)

  • New Media Culture in Korea (KOREAN 1086/2086)

  • Korean Cinema (KOREAN 1088/2088)

Carnegie Mellon University (2014-2017)

  • Topics in Korean Culture (ML 82252)

  • Korean Culture Through Film (ML 82253)

  • World of Korea: History, Culture, and Media (ML 82254)

    Education & Training

  • PhD, English/Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2014
  • MA, Comparative Literature, Yonsei University, 2003
  • BA, English Literature, Yonsei University, 1999
Representative Publications

“Nose Nose Nose EYES!: Korean Horror and Naturalist Sensibility,” Monstrum 5.2 (December 2022). (https://doi.org/10.7202/1096047ar)

“Singing Through Impossible Modernization: Sopyonje and National Cinema in the Era of Globalization.” In Andrew D. Jackson, ed. The Two Koreas and Their Global Engagements (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).

“The Kubo Project: Content-Language-Technology Integration Through Literature” in Carmela B. Scala, ed. Engaging Today’s Learners in Language Classes (Vernon Press, 2022); coauthored with Yong-taek Kim, Hyun-kyu Yi, and Mina Lee.

“Korea, the Land of the Living Dead: The Biopolitics of the Korean Zombie Apocalypse” Metamorphosis 1 (June 2021).

Research Interests

For me, film becomes most compelling when it encounters counter-histories. I am drawn to how it illuminates heterogeneous experiences and invites us to rethink our established perceptions of the world. Anchored in this interest in film’s distinctive engagement with obscured histories, my teaching and research explore a range of topics, including Korean cinema, transnational cinema, genre reinvention, popular spectatorship, historical trauma, naturalist cinema, and realism of the supernatural. My work also extends to the evolving new media technology. While my principal focus is Korea, I see it as a powerful example of how new modes of sociocultural mediation are profoundly reshaping everyday life.