#  Theodore Hughes | Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 15, 2026** 

 04:30PM - 06:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **(In-Person) Thomas Chan-Soo Kang Room (S050), CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138**  



 

 



 

*Korea Colloquium*

**Theodore Hughes**  
Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities, Columbia University

Theodore Hughes is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of *Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier* (Columbia University Press, 2012; awarded the AAS James B. Palais Book Prize) and *Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War* (Columbia University Press, 2026). He is the former Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia and the former Editor-in-Chief of the *Journal of Korean Studies.* He is currently working on a project that approaches the South Korean mystery novel as a form of historiography.

Chaired by **Chan Yong Bu,** Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

**Abstract:**  
Theodore Hughes crosses borders to demonstrate how stories of dying and death―what he calls the thanatographic imagination―in North Korea, the United States, and South Korea energize ideas about history, the present, and the future. What meanings are attached to deaths in a so-called “limited war” that turned out to be limitless? What does the 1953 armistice reveal about the nature of war itself in the post-1945 era? *Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War* shows how literary texts, films, nonfiction, and other forms of cultural production from the late 1940s to the 1960s give rise to revolutionary belongings, gendered selfhoods, and anticommunist cosmopolitanisms as they address an incommensurate loss of life in war and multiple forms of postarmistice violence.

*Generously supported by the Sunshik Min Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Korean Literature at the Korea Institute, Harvard University*



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Korea Colloquium ](/eventtypelecture/korea-colloquium)
 
 

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