by Cherise Fung, CEAS project assistant
On April 15, 2025, the Center for the Humanities welcomed 800 high school students and their teachers from 27 schools across Wisconsin to the UW-Madison campus for the annual Great World Texts (GWT) in Wisconsin student conference. The 2024-25 program focused on Cho Nam-joo’s third novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which has had a profound impact on the problem of sex discrimination in Korean society. The novel, which details the descent of the titular character, Kim Jiyoung, into psychic distress in the face of everyday sexism, has been credited with launching Korea’s latest feminist movement.
CEAS was proud to support the GWT program and its chosen text with the Center for the Humanities this past academic year. CEAS faculty partnered with the Center to select the text, write the curricular guide, and organize the conference. We were delighted to see the results of the 2024-25 program, which were on full display at the student conference on April 15. In total, 2500 Wisconsin students read Cho’s novel.
Launched in 2005, the GWT in Wisconsin program connects high school teachers and students across the state with scholars at UW-Madison through the shared project of reading and discussing a classic piece of world literature. Now in its twentieth year, GWT has reached tens of thousands of students and teachers in dozens of school districts throughout the state of Wisconsin. The program employs a capacious understanding of classic literature in its selection of texts across various time periods and geographic locations.
This is the second time that a text by an East Asian author has been selected for the GWT program in the past five years. The previous East Asian GWT text was Dream of Ding Village by Chinese novelist Yan Lianke in 2020-21. CEAS also partnered with the Center for Humanities to support the program that year.
As in previous years, the GWT program continued its practice of offering schools complimentary copies of its chosen text for 2024-25, which were then taught in Wisconsin classrooms. Participating teachers were provided with the opportunity to attend a colloquium to work with UW-Madison faculty members on interpreting and understanding the text, extensive supporting curriculum materials, and a stipend to participate in the GWT Annual Student Conference. The conference is a culmination of the year-long program during which students from all participating schools come together to share their creative responses to the text and hear from distinguished speakers, often including the text’s author or contemporary representative.
High school students had the chance to meet author Cho Nam-joo, who delivered the keynote address alongside interpreter Robert Holloway at this year’s conference. After the keynote session, students shared a wide range of projects that were created in response to the novel. CEAS staff had the pleasure of interacting with some of the students who were present and gained some insight into their creative processes behind performance pieces, poems, essays, blogs, collages, and more.
Among the highlights of the afternoon poster sessions was a satirical blog, “5 Expectations for Korean Women,” that a pair of students had made to demonstrate the double standard for men and women in Korea. They chose to write the blog from the perspective of two men to effectively “show the ugly truth about how Korean women are being treated with prejudice, sexism, and otherness in modern society.” Another student had made a TikTok account from the perspective of Kim Jiyoung which romanticized the life of a stay-at-home mom by documenting the supposed pleasures of domestic bliss. She commented on the resonances between her enactment of Kim’s online persona and the explosion of “tradwife” content, a trend that embraces traditional gender roles, across social media.
Wisconsin’s engagement with this prolific text extended beyond high school students that evening as Cho spoke to more than 150 members of the Madison community during a partnership event between the Center for the Humanities and the Wisconsin Book Festival. CEAS faculty affiliate and assistant professor of Sociology and Asian Languages and Cultures Eunsil Oh served as the moderator for that evening’s conversation at the Madison Central Public Library. Cho Nam-joo shared the rippling impacts of her groundbreaking novel across South Korea, reflected on her writing process, and delighted in a number of insightful audience questions.
The 2025-26 GWT is Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author and the student conference will take place on Tuesday, April 7, 2026 at UW-Madison. Author Okorafor will be joining the conference in-person as the 2026 keynote speaker.
CEAS and the Center for Humanities are hoping to partner again in the future to bring texts from East Asia to Wisconsin. Find out about such future collaborations and related events by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, which is released every Monday during the Fall and Spring semesters.