Jimin Kang

Bridging my academic backgrounds in environmental theory, transatlantic literatures, and Latin American cultures and literatures, I seek to explore how human encounters with non-human Others illuminate what it means to live in times of great environmental and social change. I am also interested in the philosophy of literature and ways in which reading and writing fiction in particular impact the way we move through the world. 

I strive to take an interdisciplinary, creative-critical approach in my work. As an undergraduate at Princeton, I translated two books by the Brazilian Indigenous author Daniel Munduruku, focusing on how Indigenous cosmologies might orient modern-day, non-Indigenous readers towards new environmental ethics. At Oxford, I wrote my first dissertation on the invention and dissolution of selfhoods in novels by Clarice Lispector (A paixão segundo G.H.) and Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), and my second—this time with a social scientific approach—on how U.K.-based writers of color weave their lived experiences into climate fiction narratives. My academic writing—on multilingualism in Henry James and James Baldwin, and an adaptation of my second master's dissertation—can be found in the James Baldwin Review and Wasafiri. I am generally interested in themes of language, translation, life writing, fiction, and the environmental humanities, and welcome opportunities to collaborate in these areas.

In addition to being a scholar, I am also a writer, journalist and editor. Prior to my time at Stanford, I spent two summers reporting for the Brazil bureau of Reuters, launched a column on Hong Kong writing in The Oxonian Review, and wrote a novel, Lessons in Attention, which is forthcoming with Tin House in late 2026. My essays and book reviews can be found in The New York Times, The Nation, and Asymptote Journal, among other outlets; my short fiction has been published in The Kenyon Review, Joyland, and The London Magazine.