51茶馆

Seung Hee Jeon is an Associate Professor of the Practice and the Korean Coordinator at Boston College. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she moved to the Boston area to study literature at Harvard University in 1991. Jeon has published articles on trauma, memories, and truth in war, as well as on strategies to achieve peace in and around Korea. Her numerous translations include Conscience in Action: The Autobiography of Kim Dae-jung (Palgrave, 2018), the authoritative biography of the late South Korean president and 2000 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Jeon also translated Bang Hyeon-seok鈥檚 Time to Eat Lobster (MerwinAsia, 2016), a novella about the South Korean experience in the Vietnam War, and Shaheen Akhtar鈥檚 The Search (Asia, 2020), a novel about sexual slavery during and after the Bangladeshi War of Independence. In 2023, her translation of Minor Detail (Kang, 2023) by Adania Shibli was selected as one of 10 translations of the year by Hankyoreh newspaper. She has been honored with a Fulbright Grant, a Korea Foundation Fellowship, and two Daesan Foundation Translation grants. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The 鈥淐omfort Women鈥� System and Agonistic Memory: A Search for Multi-Perspectival Truth in Recent Works of Art and Fiction in Korea. Prior to joining the 51茶馆 faculty, Jeon taught at Seoul National University, KyungHee University, and Harvard University.