Biography
Taylor Yoonji Kang is a PhD student in the combined program in Comparative Literature and Early Modern Studies. Her dissertation project, “Perspective-Technologies of the Early Modern World,” investigates how perspective came to be a shorthand for discourses of vision, selfhood, and knowledge during the Renaissance. In centering various developments in early modern Europe, from the development of one point linear perspective to New World “discoveries” to the Cartesian ego, perspective emerged as an especially persuasive intellectual techne. But she argues that perspective also takes on ontological implications in this period, cohering around a particular set of philosophical commitments that still undergird how we understand ourselves in relation to the world. Marshalling recent work on the ontological turn from anthropologists such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, she argues instead for a multi-perspectival account of the early modern world, working across European and East Asian poetics, visual culture, book-historical and philological practices, and intellectual history, with a special emphasis on Chosŏn Korea. In addition to her work in early modern studies, she maintains an active interest in the afterlives of early modernity, particularly as pertains to the global avant- and neo-avant-gardes. Through the support of a Light Fellowship and an Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) Fellowship, she is on non-cumulative leave from the program from Fall 2024 to Spring 2026 to pursue dissertation-related language training and research.
Dissertation:
“Perspective-Technologies of the Early Modern World.”
Publications in Peer-Reviewed Journals:
“Making (Non-)Sense: Filologici giochi del telefono senza fili di una pagina di Poema & Oggetto (Niccolai, Potocki, Irving, Caillois, e altre mani),” il verri: “Giulia Niccolai, l’ho scritto «io»” (Special Issue), no. 86, October 2024: 77-97.
“Metaphoric Botanies: Conjectures on the Renaissance fœtus,” Revue de Synthèse: “Frontières du vivant. Troubles épistémologiques et linguistiques dans l’Europe de la première Modernité” (Special Issue, ed. Dominique Brancher), 143 (1), Spring 2022: 179-204.
“Staging (or Not Staging) Ovid for Modern(ist) Self-Fashioning,” with Alessandro Giammei, MLN, 135 (1), January 2020: 203-30.
Book Chapter:
“La poetica dell’obsolescenza di Giulia Niccolai,” trans. Alessandro Giammei, in Giulia Niccolai, eds. Marco Belpoliti, Giammei, and Nunzia Palmieri (Rome: Quodlibet 2023): 437-57. Reviewed in il manifesto, oblio.
Translations:
Translation of Michela Murgia’s “Cartone animato” (2023). Asymptote, April 2024.
Translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Commento allo scritto del Bresson” (1943). Heretical Aesthetics: Piero Paolo Pasolini’s Writings on Art and Art History, eds. Alessandro Giammei and Ara Merjian (New York: Verso Books 2023).
Public-Facing Writing:
“Moving in Stereo: On Brooke Belisle’s Depth Effects,” Chicago Review, forthcoming.
“Whose (Who’s) Shakespeare? On Amelia Rosselli’s Sleep,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2024.