In Their Words: Ka-eul Yoo

Name: Ka-eul Yoo

College: UCSC, Humanities Division, Graduate Program

Department: Literature

What Award/Scholarship did you receive? Jessica Roy Memorial Award

What year do you expect to graduate? June 2021 (expected)

Where do you call home? I call home where I can think about my future, not only about my present. Also, my home has to let me just be myself. I think both Korea and the United States are my home now.

With all of the choices for college, what made UC Santa Cruz stand out? I chose UCSC for its interdisciplinary work environment. Lots of faculty and institutions in UCSC highly encourage hybrid and innovative studies; therefore, I can experiment with intriguing and unconventional ideas with strong guidance and support.

What is your field of focus? My main academic interests are transnational Asian American studies, critical Asian studies, war/empire studies, gender and sexuality studies, theater and performance studies, medical humanities, and disability studies.

What do you hope to do once you graduate from UC Santa Cruz? As an educator and researcher, I aim to persist my intellectual and political commitment to furthering race, gender, and disability studies.

What is one memorable moment that stands out for you as a student here? As a student, one of the most memorable moments is my interaction with faculty and students from the Critical Race & Ethnic Studies (CRES) program. As a graduate student representative of CRES in the 2018-2019 academic year, I am highly influenced by critical thought and activism from faculty and students in this program. Sharing precious moments with them via academic activism, attending CRES lectures, and also offering my race and disability centered class in CRES as a graduate teaching fellow, I could have been pursuing more nuanced perspectives on the intersection of race, gender, and disability, and this experience is elevating my dissertation project.

What is your one piece of advice for incoming students about life at UC Santa Cruz? Be ready to engage with race and gender issues deeply. UCSC welcomes interdisciplinary ideas, so think this place as a cultural laboratory which you could not experiment in any other settings. Unfortunately, one major difficult issue here is finding a house at a reasonable price. If you decide to come to UCSC, I would like you to contact graduate students and the graudate student advisor in your home department first and ask for a housing list or any other information about housing.

How will this scholarship impact your academic life/research? I firmly believe that Jessica L. Roy Memorial Award will enable me to analyze understudied original sources, thus strengthening the comparative angle of my research and provide critical support for completing my Ph.D. program within the scheduled timeline. As an international student, I receive two years less funding than my cohort, which makes it particularly difficult to conduct meaningful archival research and complete critical writing without funding.