Mason Korea English Professor Dr. Hyunyoung Cho was selected by George Mason’s Center for Humanities Research (CHR) to receive summer funding to support ongoing projects related to the humanities.
Dr. Cho is the first faculty member at Mason Korea to receive a CHR research grant. Dr. Cho, who serves as the English Program Coordinator at Mason Korea and specializes in early modern British literature (a period in England from around 1485 to 1660), will be using the $3000 grant to support her article-length project, "Birds and Bugs in 'To His Coy Mistress': Re-working Egyptian Solar Mythology in the Age of Bacon."
Focusing on Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress,” Dr. Cho explores how poets participated in that period’s new interest in empirical observation and knowledge of the natural world. She hopes that by demonstrating a fertile interplay between literature and science, we can move away from the assumption that these two spheres of knowledge are opposed, rather than mutually generative.
Dr. Cho was recently elected to serve on the executive committee of the Andrew Marvell Society. She gave an initial airing of this project as a conference presentation at the South Central Renaissance Conference this March. The paper was well received, and she is now seeking to conduct additional research in order to expand the conference paper this summer for publication.
“I am excited about this research project and grateful for the support from the Center for Humanities Research,” said Dr. Cho. “The grant further deepens my sense of belonging to the George Mason family. I would also like to thank my academic and administrative colleagues both in Fairfax and Songdo who have gone out of their way to smooth out the wrinkles inevitable in such cross-border collaborations. In our willingness to work through such inconveniences, I believe, we are all modeling for our students what it means to work together in our diverse and globalized world,” she added.
May 19, 2022
