Erin Jeon is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences from Queens, New York. She is majoring in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. Her academic interests include Asian American literature, colonial language politics, and the relationship between literary form and political resistance. As a Wolf Humanities Fellow, Erin is researching Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, examining how the text's fragmented, multilingual form enacts the practice of dictation as both submission to and resistance against colonial power. At Penn, she is a business manager of Bloomers Comedy, a campus tour guide with the Kite and Key Society, and an office assistant at Penn First Plus.
Erin Jeon
Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow
2026—2027 Forum on Practice
Erin Jeon
English, Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies
Practicing Dictation: Obedience and Refusal in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee
This project reads dictation as a practice in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1982) not simply a subject the text represents, but something the text does and enacts on the reader. Cha's hybrid, multilingual work mixes poetry, photography, official documents, and personal memory to explore displacement and colonial language politics for a Korean-American woman caught between languages that were never fully hers. I argue that Dictee's fragmented form is not merely stylistic but constitutes the text's political and emotional argument, performed through repeated practices of dictation, translation, and memory rather than stated outright. Reading dictation as a colonial technology, used to enforce Japanese over Korean and later English over Korean in the diaspora, this project traces how Cha's precise reproduction of these commands turns an act of total obedience into an act of refusal. In dialogue with the Wolf Humanities Center's 2026-2027 theme, Practice, this project asks what it means for a text to practice displacement on its reader rather than simply depict it.