Catherine Ryu
ryuc@msu.edu
(517) 353-6656
B359 Wells Hall
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
FacultyLinguistics, Languages, and Cultures
Associate Professor
Japanese Studies Program
Biography
Ph.D., Asian Languages and Cultures (Japanese), University of Michigan
Catherine Ryu is associate professor of Japanese literature & culture and affiliated faculty of Digital Humanities. She received her PhD at the University of Michigan and was a visiting scholar there at the Nam Center for Korean Studies for the 2022-23 academic year. Her teaching and research interests include Classical Japanese, Japanese culture and literature, Korean literature, Zainichi literature, translation studies, children’s literature, digital humanities, global studies, and more. She also holds a U.S. patent for a language learning platform and is the principal investigator of several projects. One of them is Tone Perfect, a multimodal Mandarin Chinese audio database (https://toneperfect.lib.msu.edu/) that received the 2018 Esperanto Access to Language Education Award and the 2019 Open Scholarship Award.
Her recent publications include a book chapter, “How to Develop Gamified Pedagogical Strategies: A Case Study of Classical Japanese Poetry in the Undergraduate Classroom,” in Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom, edited by Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramsey and published in 2022 by Bloomsbury; another book chapter, “A Flight of Cultural Imagination in Heian Japan: The Image of Yang Guifei in Genji monogatari and ‘Chang hen ge,’” in Crossing Boundaries & Confounding Identity: Chinese Women in Literature, Art, and Film, edited by Cheryl C.D. Hughes and published in 2023 by SUNY Press; and a review article, “More than a Woman: Illuminating the Multifaceted Nature of Yamauba/Yamamba,” in the Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 82, issue 2, 2023. She is one of the co-editors of Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asian Empire, which will be published in November 2023 by the University of Hawaii Press. She is currently leading a translation project with six other translators. Once completed, it will be the very first English translation of 13 short stories authored by ethnic Koreans in China known as Chaoxianzu (朝鮮族) or Chosŏnjok (조선족) in Korea. Related to this project is a digital humanities initiative with Olivia Hale, “Movements through Time and Space: Visualizing a Literary Journey by Ethnic Koreans in China,” which utilizes network analysis to delineate spaciotemporal dimensions such as recollections and future projections within stories that cannot be visualized through geospatial data-based mapping.
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