Dohee Kang

Dohee Kang is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Grinnell College.

Her current book project examines how modern and contemporary South Korean writers draw on the ideals, literary traditions, and reform movements of Buddhism to navigate questions of national identity, modernity, and political oppression. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, she demonstrates that literature ultimately functions as a site where Buddhist ideas are negotiated in twentieth- and twenty-first century South Korea.

Her recent publications explore how contemporary South Korean literature challenges and expands the category of the minjung (the masses) within the discourse of Minjung Buddhism (Buddhism for the people) by foregrounding marginalized forms of embodiment, from female bodies to discarded non-human beings and objects.

Her broader research interests include shamanism and religious syncretism in Korea and its diaspora, East Asian religions and cultures, religion and film, Buddhist poetics, and Buddhism as therapy.

She previously taught at Georgetown University.