Alex Chun

Research and teaching interests

Dong Hwan (Alex) Chun examines the various ways in which early modern poets, especially John Milton, attempted to converse with the ancients. In particular, he looks at how literary productions of Renaissance humanists were influenced and shaped by their discourse with classical authors as well as by contemporary cultural interactions. Intrigued by the readiness with which Renaissance humanists negotiated with the classics, he reads early modern literary works by interrogating how humanist scholars contended with the classics for various political, aesthetic, and cultural reasons. He explores how they playfully and sometimes anxiously collaborated with classical authors to produce dynamic systems of meanings that spoke to early modern worldviews and socio-political conditions. He taught for the university's Writing Program for two semesters and served as an editorial assistant for Spenser Studies for a year. He worked as a copy-editor for the book review team at Religion & Literature and was its Managing Editor with Nicholas Babich. He was also a graduate fellow at the Nanovic Institute for two years, and he is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Navari Center for Digital Scholarship. He is scheduled to teach Latin at the Westville Correctional Facility through the Moreau College Initiative program at Holy Cross College (Notre Dame, IN).

Representative publications

Chun, Dong Hwan. "Infernal Rhetoric: Counseling and Listening among the Fallen Angels in Paradise Lost," Milton Studies (Forthcoming).

The Virtue of Listening to Counsel in Paradise Lost. 2023. University of Notre Dame, Ph.D. dissertation. 

Chun, Dong Hwan. "'free unforced judgments': Envisioning the Ideal Republic through Freedom of Speech in The Tragedy of Cicero." Milton and Early Modern English Studies 27.2 (2017): 51-74.

Chun, Dong Hwan. "'Sole Author I': Samson's Fatal Decisions in Samson Agonistes" IEAS Journal of English and American Studies 14 (2015): 5-22.

Chambers, Claire Maria, and Dong Hwan Alex Chun. Review of Musical Woyzeck. dir. Yun Ho Jin. Theatre Journal 67.3 (2015): 541-43.