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Ethan Waddell received his MA degree in English at Yonsei University and��earned his PhD degree at the University of Chicago in 2024. His��dissertation, entitled “Listening to South Korean Fiction through Popular Songs, 1950s-1970s,” examines popular music embedded in and constitutive of a selection of Korean prose fictions composed amidst the three-decade long turbulence of militarization, cold war realignment, and rapid development in the southern part of Korea beginning with liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945.

His dissertation was recognized by the Korean Research Network (KoRN) for a Korean Studies PhD dissertation manuscript workshop and by��the Franke Institute for the Humanities for a��Residential Dissertation Completion Fellowship. He is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his��dissertation as well as a��co-translation of Kee Hyung Han’s monograph on censorship and Korean literature, entitled Colonial Spheres of Writing (Singminji ŭi munyŏk, 2019). Additionally, he has participated in projects aimed at facilitating greater access to primary materials for Korean studies: the�� and the��.

Publications:

• “Psychedelic Codes and Close Listening to South Korean Fiction, 1971–1989.” positions: asia critique 33, no. 1 (2025) [forthcoming].
• “Connecting the Plots: The Extension of Return and Korean Ethnic Nationalism in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Fugitive Visions.” Cultural Studies Review 23, no. 1 (2017): 87–101.

Research and Teaching Interests:

Modern and contemporary Korean literature, popular music and culture, print culture, transmedial aesthetics, translation, bibliographic studies, diasporic writing