My name is Kayla Smitson, I am a first-year postgraduate student in the department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. My research primarily deals with literary trauma theory and revolutions within East Asia. What draws me to the study of trauma fiction is its ability to engage readers in trauma’s ethical dilemmas. It is trauma in fiction that produces the awareness of the multidimensionality of a traumatic event, and in particular, the social influences that shape the survivor’s personality, the textual modeling of the individual’s mind, and the ability for readers to engage in a “compassionate correspondence between reader and survivor.”[1]
I graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with a degree in Asian Studies and Korean. However, I formally studied Chinese Brush Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing as well as at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. In 2019, I was also afforded the opportunity to study East Asian Literature at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea where the Gwangju Uprising ultimately began.
