Yea Jung Park

 Fictions of Discernment in Late Medieval England

At the Institute, Yea Jung will work on her book project, which presents an account of medieval practices of mental-state attribution, or “mind-reading,” as they surface in literary narratives through the trope of “discernment.” The book provides a rationale for reading a variety of medieval literary genres, including works of religious instruction, epic and chivalric romances, and autobiography, as thought-experiments on the possibilities of mind-reading. The project tracks how narrative innovations arise in the process of testing out methods of social cognition, and conversely, how new approaches to other minds are made possible through the affordances of literature and fiction.

Yea Jung Park is a medievalist and literary scholar from Seoul, South Korea. She received her PhD from Columbia in 2022, specializing in Middle English literature, and will be starting as Assistant Professor of English at Saint Louis University following her fellowship. Her research interests include religion and literature, social epistemology, gesture studies, the history of medicine, and translation.