Christina Yi

Christina Yi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, specializing in Modern Japanese Literature. She is currently on leave from September 1, 2024, to August 31, 2025.

Her research explores intersections of postcoloniality, language politics, genre studies, and cultural studies in modern and contemporary Japanese literature. Her groundbreaking monograph, Colonizing Language (2018), examines linguistic nationalism and literary canon formation during the Japanese Empire, focusing on Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s–1950s. She further investigates repatriation literature (hikiage bungaku) through fiction, essays, and memoirs from Japanese and non-Japanese writers.

Her publications include a 2016 article on gendered imperial dynamics in positions: asia critique, contributions to The Funambulist, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, The New Yorker, and Waseda RILAS Journal. She was awarded the

• William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize (2011)

for translating Kim Saryang’s Pegasus (Tenma).

Her work has been supported by grants from the

• Northeast Asia Council of AAS
• Peter Wall Institute at UBC
• Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
• SSHRC Insight Development Grant
• SSHRC Insight Grant (2018–2023)

.