K-Food and Poetry

 

 

 

We are delighted to announce that out keynote lecture for this term will be on K-Food and Poetry and will be given by Professor Jieun Kiaer. Please find more information on the talk below, which will be held in the Dahrendorf Room at St Antony's College from 5pm. 

 

Professor Kiaer, based in the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Faculty of Oxford University, is an expert researcher of Hallyu (Korean Wave) and cultural linguistics, amongst a host of research specialties. We are incredibly excited to hear her talk about food as lived memory and its impact on Korean literature, including on Professor Kiaer's own poetic journey. Please see the abstract below for more details:

 

 

Food carries emotional, linguistic, and relational meanings in all societies, far beyond simple nourishment. This talk centres on the Korean food experience and on my own practice of writing poetry about food to explore how food becomes lived memory.

 

In Korean, to ask “Have you had your rice?” is not merely to ask whether someone has eaten; it is an expression of care and connection. The rice table (bapsang) becomes a multidimensional space where language, memory, and embodied experience converge. 

 

Drawing on contemporary Korean literature, alongside reflections from my bilingual poetry collection Bapsang (“Rice Table”): Have You Had Your Rice? (2025), I examine how food functions as a sensory archive through which grief, loss, migration, family history, and intergenerational ties are remembered and reshaped.

 

In diasporic life especially, food preserves what language alone cannot fully express. Writing about food becomes a form of translation across languages, a cultural continuity that sustains identity beyond geography.