Faculty Profiles

Jeehyun* Choi studies and teaches Asian American and diasporic literatures, with particular interest in transpacific cultural productions that engage the history of multiple imperialisms in Asia. Her current book project examines the political commitments of Korean American/diasporic writers who produce new modalities of anti-imperial resistance in transnational contexts. Her work pivots around newly discovered and forgotten texts written in Korean and English, arguing that a translingual understanding of Asian American literature forces us to reconsider enduring narratives of Asian diasporic history. Jeehyun approaches translation as an opportunity to discover the rich social histories that have shaped Korean diasporic imagination. Before coming to Rutgers, she was a Korea Foundation-Korea Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.

* pronounced Jee-hyuhn, rhyming with “sun”

I am a theater and performance scholar working across critical theory, politics and aesthetics, performance studies, and modern drama; my research considers the politics of embodiment and the theater of public life in the twentieth century and today. I have a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University, where I held a Deans’ Faculty Fellowship before coming to Rutgers. I teach courses on dramatic literature, performance, media, culture, and theory.

I work at the intersection of two critical frames in theater and performance studies: one that interprets the world (and its acts, signs, texts) as performance, and another that uses theater as a means of dialectical theory. My work also takes up the embodiment of racial and sexual difference; carcerality, totalitarianism, and surveillance; and the interplay of state/social subjection and mass media. Currently, I am writing a book on how gestures prepare bodies to participate in systems of control in the United States today. Using theatrical gesture as a model for reading movement in the everyday, I argue that gestures work as embodied scripts, reproducing histories we do not recognize and might otherwise disavow.

I am also a stage director, with an interdisciplinary practice and ongoing collaborations in new work devising (talleymurphy.com). In the past, I have worked as a development, production, and institutional dramaturg. I also make critical and experimental video.

Professor Scanlon is the author of Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (1994).  He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Literature, 1100-1500 (2009), and co-editor of John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (with James Simpson, 2005).  He has published numerous essays on Middle English, Old French, Medieval Latin texts and traditions.  He has also published on medievalism, and American and African-American Literature.  He is currently completing a lengthy study on homoeroticism in later medieval literature and culture. Its tentative title is At Sodom's Gate: The Sin Against Nature from Plato to John Lydgate.  He is also co-editing (with Susan Nakley) an anthology of essays entitled Barbarous Tongues that focuses on problem of race, religious alterity, and Christian, Muslim, and Jewish relations in later medieval culture.

Professor Levao's publications include: Selected Poems of Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, and Sir Walter Ralegh (2001); Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (1985). He has also edited the Longman Cultural Edition of Henry IV, Parts I & II (2006). and The Annotated Frankenstein (2012), coedited with Professor Susan Wolfson.  Professor Levao has also authored the articles: "Shakespeare's Ghosts and Coleridge's Hamlet" (Journal of Romanticism, 2021); "William Davenant," Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (2020); "La Science de Frankenstein" Frankenstein: Cree des Tenebres (2016); "'Where Black is the Color, Where None is the Number': Something from Nothing in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Literary Imagination, (2010); "They Hate us Youth': Byron's Falstaff," Literary Imagination (2009)"Among Unequals What Society: Paradise Lost and the Forms of Intimacy" (Modern Language Quarterly, 2000); "Francis Bacon and the Mobility of Science" (Representations, 1991); "Recent Studies in Marlowe" (English Literary Renaissance, 1988); "Reading the Fights: Making Sense of Professional Boxing" (Raritan, 1986); and "Sidney's Feigned Apology" (PMLA, 1979).