Regional Coordinator Profiles
Seung Hee Jeon
Where you live: Belmont, MA
Your representative: Katherine Clark
Occupation: Professor
Chapter: New England
Seung Hee Jeon, co-chair of the New England Korea Peace Campaign (NEKPC), is a long-time peace and democracy movement activist, as well as a literary scholar and translator of Korean and other literature. Together with other members of NEKPC, she has organized webinars and a quarterly lecture series titled “Prospects for Korea,” and has participated in various public events advocating for peace. She has published articles on war trauma, memories, and truth, as well as the current conditions for peace in and around Korea. Her numerous translations include Conscience in Action: The Autobiography of Kim Dae-jung (Palgrave, 2018), the authoritative biography of the late South Korean president and 2000 Nobel Peace Prize winner. She also translated Bang Hyeon-seok’s Time to Eat Lobster (MerwinAsia, 2016), a novella about the South Korean experience in the Vietnam War, and Shaheen Akhtar’s The Search (Asia, 2020), a novel about sexual slavery during and after the Bangladeshi War of Independence. This work won the 3rd Asian Literature Award that year. She has been honored with a Fulbright Grant, a Korea Foundation Fellowship, and two Daesan Foundation Translation grants. Based in Boston and Seoul, she is an associate professor of Korean at Boston College.