Assistant Professor Travis Workman has been named a University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professor, the highest honor the University awards to junior faculty. Travis will hold the title from 2014-16.
The purpose of the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship program is to advance the careers of the most promising junior faculty members who are at the beginning stages of their professional careers, and who have the potential to make significant contributions to their departments and to their scholarly fields.
The award will support Travis research on "Melodrama and the Cold War: Ideas and Emotion in Korean Cinemas" that analyzes the melodramatic mode in the cinema cultures on both sides of the Cold War, focusing on the South Korean and North Korean film industries (1945-89). Expanding on his first book on humanism in the Japanese empire, he explores the political, social, and humanist ideas of Cold War melodrama, as well as parodies and critiques of its dominant images of a world split in two.
