Overview
Mee-Ju Ro is a Ph.D. Candidate who works on Asian American literature with a focus on gender, trauma and sexuality. Her dissertation Entangled Testimonies: The Metrics of Reported Speech is a critique of testimony as a technology of reported speech – it looks at literary and social forms of women’s autobiographies and testimonies and asks the question: during critical moments of historical redress, how has the genre of testimony functioned as both a politically empowering and complicit technology? She suggests that testimony be rethought as a translation rather than a “transmission.” Most importantly, the argument unfolds within a framework of “entanglement” which draws on the concept of quantum entanglement as a way to radically shift how we think about relationality and communication. She is committed to a study of Asian American literature within a trans-Pacific context.
Her article, “Missing Mom: Translation as Testimony in Shin Kyung-Sook’s Please Look After Mom,” was published in the interdisciplinary Canadian journal Mosaic (2016). She has taught courses like “Hauntings in Asian American Literature,” “Mourning the Dead,” “Mystery in the Story,” and TA’d for the English Department and the Asian American Studies Program. She will be teaching “Translation and Transnational Literatures” in the Spring of 2018. She is also an aspiring short story writer who has recently published her first, “seoriseori,” in The New Quarterly.
Research Focus
- Asian American, Asian Canadian Literature
- Trans-pacific Studies
- Race, Gender, and Sexuality
- Translation Studies
- Trauma Theory
