Ye Ram (Esther) Kim

yeram@uchicago.edu
Cohort Year: 2022
Research Interests: North African & Maghrebi literature, Francophone literature, diasporic literature, contemporary Korean literature, Zainichi literature, multilingualism, postcolonial Theory, translation theory, trauma theory, and Amazighité

I’m a joint Ph.D student in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (French & Francophone Studies). I grew up in Tunisia, and I work across French, Modern Standard Arabic, Tunisian darija, Korean, and Japanese with an interest in multilingualism, postcolonialism, diaspora, translation, and trauma.

My research challenges traditional postcolonial pairings of the colonizer–colonized dichotomy, offering new methodological frameworks for studying diasporic literatures across continents. By conducting a comparative analysis of Maghrebi (North African) and Korean diasporic writers in “third spaces,” I explore transcontinental and shared experiences of marginalization and linguistic negotiation to reshape our understanding of diasporic identities and narratives. In my work, I aim to shed light on how multilingual contexts shape identity, memory, and cultural expression, by examining how languages intersect, reclaim, and interact in literature.