Office: HMNSS 2510
Phone: (951) 827-1260
Fax: (951) 827-2160

john.kim@ucr.edu

JOHN NAMJUN KIM
Assistant Professor, German/Japanese/Comparative Literature
Ph.D. in German, Cornell University, 2004

John Namjun Kim specializes in critical theory and modern German and Japanese literature and philosophy. His specific areas of research include Kant and German Idealism, German Classicism and Romanticism, as well as Heidegger and the Kyoto School. His current book project, The Reflection of Violence: Temporality and Integration from German Idealism to Imperial Japan, examines the temporal structure of social integration from the Kantian perspective of “reflective judgment” and the modern production of “minority” subjects. He offers a wide variety of courses ranging from undergraduate German language classes to graduate seminars on contemporary critical theory. In the 2006 – 2007 academic year he will offer the following courses: CPLT 028 “Justice, Law, Violence” and an independent study workshop, “Reading Kant in German” (Fall ‘06); GER 173 “Age of Goethe: Faust” (Winter ‘07); as well as JPN 145 “Modern Japanese Thought” and CPLT 220 “German Aesthetic Theory” (Spring ‘07).

Professor Kim’s publications include “Kant’s Saving Clause and Secret Article: Irony, Performativity and History in Zum ewigen Frieden,” in The Germanic Review (forthcoming 2007): “On the Brink of Universality: German Cosmopolitanism in Japanese Imperialism,” in positions: east asia cultures critique ( f orthcoming 2007); “The Temporality of Empire” in Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History , edited by J. Victor Koschmann and Sven Saaler ( London: Routledge, i n press 2006); as well as an article in Japanese “ Cultural Heterogeneity and Philosophical Nationalism ,” in Quadrante: A Journal for the Synthesis of Regions, Cultures, and Class. 4 (2002): 259-69. He also currently serves on the editorial collective of Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation (University of Washington Press).