Vanessa Baker

Email:

bakervc@iu.edu

Office:

Global and International Studies Building, 2075

Office hours:

Office Hours by appointment only

Résumé/CV

Education

• Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 2022, East Asian Studies
• M.A., Columbia University, 2006, East Asian Languages and Cultures
• B.A., Bard College, 2004, Asian Studies

Research Interests

• Korean literature
• environmental humanities
• feminist theory
• transnational proletarian literature
• ecosocialism
• indigeneity
• environmental history
• new materialisms
• labor history
• sound studies

Courses

• Fall 2023:
  EALC E300/E505 Labor and Literature in Modern Korea
  EALC E311/E505 Korean Popular Culture
• Spring 2024:
  EALC E[ ] Leftist Literature in East Asia
  EALC E311/E505 Korean Popular Culture

Bio

My research examines the insights that Korean literature brings to our past and current moments of ecological and economic crises. With a critical focus on the everyday experience of laboring with the land, I am interested in how working bodies, ores, soils, and technologies collectively remake local environments and redefine gendered divisions of labor.
My book project, titled Mineral Tales: Unearthing Environmental Justice in Korean and Japanese Rural Proletarian Literature, proposes a new perspective on proletarian literature and its implications for contemporary ecological crises. I argue that Korean and Japanese language texts about the material makings of empire, what I refer to as “rural proletarian literature,” is critically engaged with the
ecological and corporeal degradation of local environments. I bring writers from the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago into conversation in order to map out how transnational extractive projects employed copper, gold, nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium into the mineral base of empire.