About

Ksenia Chizhova is an Associate Professor of Korean Literature at the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Her research combines methodologies of literary and cultural studies to explore vernacular Korean writing and calligraphy from the 17th century to the present, with a focus on women, gender, and family in Korea. Her first book, 'Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday,' examines the rise and fall of the lineage novel genre during the 17th to early 20th centuries, highlighting the active cultural roles of elite women as readers, calligraphers, and manuscript makers within patriarchal kinship society. The book received the inaugural 2023 Hong Yung Lee Book Award from Berkeley’s Center for Korean Studies and an Honorable Mention for the James Palais Book Prize of the Association of Asian Studies. Her ongoing project, 'Women in the Media History of the Korean Script: 1600/2000,' investigates shifts in gender politics and graphic media infrastructure shaping the visual aesthetics of the Korean script from the 17th century to contemporary times, including its use in North Korean mass mobilization art. Chizhova teaches courses that intersect Korea studies with cultural criticism, engaging both graduate and undergraduate students. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2015 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Korea Institute of Australian National University before joining Princeton in 2016.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Biology
• Genealogy
• Art
• History
• Literature
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• Virtue That Matters: Chastity Culture and Social Power in Chosŏn Korea, 1392–1910

  Gender & History · 2026-02-03

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Three Kingdoms Became a National Novel of Korea: From Sanguozhi yanyi to Samgukchi by Hyuk-chan Kwon (review)

  Seoul journal of Korean studies · 2025-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Political Moods: Film Melodrama and the Cold War in the Two Koreas

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2025-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• (Modern) Palace Women in Colonial Korea

  ˜The œjournal of Korean studies · 2025-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Crucial to the operations of the Korean court, palace women possessed special status during the history of this institution: the marriage prohibition placed them outside the traditional kinship network, and their lives, in contrast to those of most other women, were defined by the professional skills they acquired through service. This article conjures palace women as unlikely subjects of Korean colonial modernity—the early twentieth-century transformation of the capitalist public scene that opened limited pathways for women’s self-fashioning and public role. Dismissed from service after a series of colonial palace reforms in the early twentieth century, palace women remained unable to forge independent professional identities, in stark contrast to other palace workers, such as painters or female entertainers. Using the scant available archive—palace women’s petitions, diaries, and contemporary newspaper reportage—this article maps the trajectory of former palace servants across the terrain of colonial gender politics. The extant petitions submitted by palace women constitute an especially revealing site for understanding their self-perception and self-presentation. The lives of palace women—unconventional in the traditional kinship society—constitute another paradox in the context of women’s modern education and professionalization in the early twentieth century.

  PublisherDOI

• Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan: Elite Graffiti in Premodern Korea.

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2023-04-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What is a mountain? According to Maya Stiller's study of elite travel during the late Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), Mount Kŭmgang in Northern Kangwŏn Province of modern-day North Korea was a performative locus for the articulation of elite identity through travel, landscape carving, and intertextual exchange. A prized site of pilgrimage, which was originally accessible only to the most established elites, Mount Kŭmgang gradually became a key location for socially profitable memory making even for those who did not pass the prestigious civil service examination, achieve a successful government career, or could fully claim elite status.Stiller's focus on rock inscriptions centers this genre of writing as an important source material for the understanding of elite image politics during the Chosŏn dynasty. Writing had been a crucial vehicle for the creation of literati identity in premodern Korea, but Stiller's work takes us beyond the well-known genres of the literary collection, genealogy, and commemorative literature. And while the graffiti itself does not carry much information apart from the inscriber's name, its strategic placement provides an eloquent testimony to the politics of descent and agnatic status claims.The laborious process of disentangling this episodic archive is itself worth note. To make full sense of the clustered names engraved in stone, these carvings are matched with “thousands of royal palace records, government examination rosters, stele inscriptions, genealogical charts, and travel accounts” (75). The inscriptions are also introduced in the context of other records about Kŭmgang travel: travelogues, songs, board games, and paintings, which are taken outside of the usual “true-view” discussion that has dominated the study of the visual depictions of the famous mountain.Outside the genealogical information of the mountain graffiti—which record generations of agnatic kin who travel to Kŭmgang and leave their names in memory of completing this prestigious and costly journey—the carvings are presented as historically malleable material objects. The readers learn about the conscious aesthetic choices of the carvers: the calligraphic styles, locations, and the size of letters that influence the meaning of the inscription. The inscriptions are guided by an implicit social decorum of “not inscribing pretentiously large signatures or irreverently caring over previous travelers' names” (79), though persons with high government positions have license to break this rule.The historical change in the pattern of name carving follows the evolution of the status system: the inscriptions start to appear in quantity in the early eighteenth century, when patrilineality is solidified as the ground for exclusive status claims. The number of inscriptions grows in size when local monks begin offering paid carving services that extend the access to privileged memory sites to non-bureaucrats who originally had the prerogative over corvee services, and we get an inkling of how monetization of economy begins to influence claims to status. The second expansion in the number of inscriptions occurs in the late eighteenth century when travelers start exploring the more difficult and adventurous routes in Outer Kŭmgang—by that time, travel to the mountain becomes a coveted means of embodying elite identity through travel as performance.The book is composed of an introduction, brief conclusion, and four chapters. Chapter 1 reconstructs the logistics of Mount Kŭmgang travel, including the available modes of transportation, costs, the list of services provided by the local monasteries, and the elites' attitude toward travel and name carving. Chapter 2 contextualizes the development of Mount Kŭmgang into a “memory site” through a practice in which the elites created kinship textuality—a series of generational exchanges in which descendants responded to the inscriptions of their elders carved at particular sites. These memory sites, in turn, became validated after gaining recognition in the proliferating travel literature. This literature, further, solidified the elite prerogative of landscape naming. Chapter 3 casts Mount Kŭmgang into a social battleground, where various groups vie for prestige. A particular token of this struggle is the emergence of associative clusters carved by lower elites, who did not have enough resources within the kin group to create agnatic clusters of inscriptions. Chapter 4, finally, considers the so-called recumbent travel that picks up in the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries—“an expansion of popular attention to Kŭmgangsan's cultural geography that did not require physical travel” (110). This chapter reconstructs the depiction of Mount Kŭmgang in paintings, atlases and annotated maps, journey songs, board games, and literature puzzles.If the book tends toward the descriptive, especially in the last chapter, it nevertheless provides a rich, texturized account of elite travel and politics of social distinction. The unique and hard-to-access archive of mountain graffiti is presented thoughtfully and solidly as it becomes a suggestive meeting ground for art history—which is invited to look beyond its usual scope—and social history that makes a shift in its geographic coverage, moving from established regional centers dominated by particular elite groups toward a site that draws travelers from the whole of Korea. Meticulously researched and innovative in its approach, this book is a most welcome addition to the study of premodern Korea.

  PublisherDOI

• Guest Editors’ Introduction

  ˜The œjournal of Korean studies · 2022-10-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• North Korean Calligraphy: Gender, Intimacy, and Political Incorporation, 1980s–2010s

  ˜The œjournal of Korean studies · 2022-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract A ubiquitous part of everyday life, North Korean calligraphy is an easily overlooked and yet integral element of the country’s mass mobilization art. Under the curation of Kim Jong Il (Kim Chŏngil, 1941–2011), calligraphy was mobilized as a mechanism for the articulation of organistic national unity centered on the ruling Kim family and captured through the idea of the “social and political living body” (sahoe chŏngch’i chŏk saengmyŏngch’e), which mediated the familial transition of power. Cultivating penmanship identical to that of his father and expanding the hagiographic project around the revolutionary calligraphy of his parents, Kim Il Sung (Kim Ilsŏng, 1912–94) and Kim Jong Suk (Kim Chŏngsuk, 1917–49), Kim Jong Il worked out an image of charismatic familial embodiment by means of the script. In addition, calligraphy constitutes a disciplinary apparatus that coordinates performances of political intimacy, bodily training, and political interpretation within the space of everyday life. Drawing on the North Korean calligraphy textbooks, art periodicals, and visual archive, this article contextualizes the dichotomy of the idiosyncratic style of the male leaders and the feminized, ubiquitous Ch’ŏngbong style, connected with the figure of Kim Jong Suk. Special attention is given to the body symbolism and somatic discipline of North Korean calligraphy, which underlie its political efficacy as inscriptional and hermeneutic practice.

  PublisherDOI

• The Elite Vernacular Korean Culture of Chosŏn (1392–1910)

  2022-01-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Elite vernacular Korean culture constituted a domain of aesthetic and literary refinement and social prestige that was patronized by elite women and highly prized within these women’s families. By the late seventeenth century, the boundaries of the elite vernacular Korean canon circumscribed exquisite calligraphic training, epistolary conventions, and the circulation of so-called lineage novels (kamun sosŏl家門小說), which narrated the affective contradictions of domestic life. Configured around the ideal of domestic femininity, elite vernacular Korean culture was nevertheless an uneven domain, which included participants of varying skills and commitment. This chapter will highlight the hybridity of this discursive space by pursuing the manuscript history and textual analysis of The Remarkable Reunion of Jade Mandarin Ducks (Ogwŏn chaehap kiyŏn 玉鴛再合奇緣), a lineage novel that circulated in the household of Madame Chŏng of Onyang (1725–1799), who was married into the Tŏkch’ŏn branch of the Chŏnju Yi, known for their engagement with Wang Yangming’s (1472–1529) philosophy. Curiously, Jade Mandarin Ducks evinces the influence of the so-called cult of qing that swept the late imperial Chinese cultural production, foregrounding emotion as the site of authentic personhood and human relationships. The novel’s gender-bending logic illuminates the subversive edge of elite vernacular Korean literary space, and its manuscript history, which spans the royal palace, an elite household with a prominent tradition of female learning, and a more modest rural abode, highlights the different circulation circumstances of lineage novels.

  PublisherDOI

• Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2021 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Genealogy

  The lineage novel flourished in Korea from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Ksenia Chizhova foregrounds lineage novels and the domestic world in which they were read to recast the social transformations of Chosŏn Korea and the development of early modern Korean literature.

  PublisherDOI

• The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea, written by Hwisang Cho

  East Asian Publishing and Society · 2021-05-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Chang Lee

  4 shared

• Richard O. Day

  St Vincent's Hospital

  4 shared

• Park Hyun soon

  1 shared

• Sung Soon Kim

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  1 shared

• Olga Fedorenko

  Seoul National University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Hong Yung Lee Book Award of Berkeley’s Center for Korean Stu…
• Honorable Mention for the James Palais Book Prize of the Ass…