Si Nae Park

Si Nae Park is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D. in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2012. As a scholar of the literature and literary culture of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), she has growing interest in pre-Chosŏn periods, the reception of premodern Korean textual artifacts, and digital philology for premodern studies. In examining premodern Korea as a literary universe, she emphasizes the crucial pertinence of the broader Sinographic Cosmopolis. Her research shows ways to understand the written archive of premodern Korea as a rich terrain where Koreans embraced and innovatively repurposed Literary Sinitic forms, rhetorical tools, and textual technologies as shared properties of the literary cosmopolitanism of premodern East Asia while giving rise to new literary forms and aesthetic practices to redefine Literature (文); to study Korean vernacular literature beyond discourses of ethnonationalist literary history; and to illuminate the dynamic ecology of literacies and literary practices. She combines close reading, archival studies, and sociocultural and historical contextualization including prosopography, while drawing insights from studies of written cultures elsewhere within and beyond East Asia, bibliography as the sociology of texts, historical linguistics, sound and media studies, and linguistic anthropology.

Park is currently completing a manuscript for her second monograph, Writing as Utterance: Reading Aloud and Literary Imagination in Chosŏn Korea, to rediscover the creative condition of the written culture of Chosŏn Korea using a sound- and acoustic imagination-centered approach by vocal reading of Literary Sinitic via vernacular reading glosses (kugyŏl), the auditory experience of writing, and acoustic imagination pertaining to reading. The study attends to two kinds of sounds of reading: the sound of reading revered Literary Sinitic texts aloud (e.g., Confucian Classics as the textual double of the Chosŏn state ideology) and vernacular fiction as aural literature, using wide-ranging materials, including pictorial and literary representations of reading and readers, treatises on reading by scholars, reports on the sensory experience of reading, fiction commentaries, comments on translation, royal edicts, and physical evidence of book use. The book highlights a significant shift in the practice of vernacular reading around the Koryŏ-to-Chosŏn dynastic transition as a kind of reading revolution that reshaped the scriptscape, soundscape, and sociocultural imagination of literacy and literature.

Park’s first book is The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (Columbia University Press, 2020). She co-edited Score One for the Dancing Girl and Other Selections from the Kimun Ch’onghwa: A Story Collection from Nineteenth-Century Korea (University of Toronto Press, 2016). 

Park is currently completing a co-edited volume, The Material Book in Korea, from the Fifteenth through the Twentieth Centuries (under contract with The Harvard University Asia Center Publications Program). This edited volume grows out of New Perspectives on the History of Books and Reading in Korea, a conference and a rare book workshop held at Harvard University in 2022 (conference website: https://sites.harvard.edu/new-perspectives-book-history-korea/).

Park is responsible for developing and managing two online resources: “Korean Rare books & Textual Studies” (https://koreanvernacularbooks.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/) and “Premodern Korean Literary and Historical Texts in English Translation: A Timeline” (https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1TBDjGtdBBpzsrut5SWgAKjCBpD34srprcBuooos6i64&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650).

Curriculum Vitae February 2026

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