HeeJin Lee
@heejinlee.bsky.social
Assistant Professor and Marianna Brown Dietrich Breakthrough Scholar Chair of Korean Studies @ Pitt. Usual disclaimers about personal opinions, etc., apply.
Can’t believe how tone deaf the ads are these days, everyone seems to be pitching sales for chilly fall weather and it’s still in the mid-70s 🙄
October 10, 2026 at 10:25 PM
Can’t believe how tone deaf the ads are these days, everyone seems to be pitching sales for chilly fall weather and it’s still in the mid-70s 🙄
Reposted by HeeJin Lee
There’s no A.I. “literacy”. There is only power, to either rebuild or eradicate commonly shared knowledge production. They haz it. Remains to be seen if we haz some too.
October 7, 2026 at 11:49 AM
There’s no A.I. “literacy”. There is only power, to either rebuild or eradicate commonly shared knowledge production. They haz it. Remains to be seen if we haz some too.
Reposted by HeeJin Lee
Please, for the love of God, leave me behind with all the books because you don’t read. I want to be left behind!
“GOTTA LEARN AI OR BE LEFT BEHIND.” Good. Fuck off! Leave me behind! Enjoy your artbarf rapture, your janky Temu future. I’ll be back here looking at real birds and writing weird, also real, books.
October 4, 2026 at 6:48 PM
Please, for the love of God, leave me behind with all the books because you don’t read. I want to be left behind!
My calendar for October, wishing my own bookshelves looked like this!
October 1, 2026 at 12:33 PM
My calendar for October, wishing my own bookshelves looked like this!
Same view, an hour later!
September 30, 2026 at 1:38 PM
Same view, an hour later!
The view from my office this AM 😅
September 30, 2026 at 12:44 PM
The view from my office this AM 😅
Reposted by HeeJin Lee
PSA: you know what scholars love? Talking about their books! You know what you can do? Invite them to your class to do so. It’s great! You absolutely do not have to use AI or tell students to use AI to understand their books. You can get the actual real life person to help with that! For free!
September 18, 2026 at 1:25 PM
PSA: you know what scholars love? Talking about their books! You know what you can do? Invite them to your class to do so. It’s great! You absolutely do not have to use AI or tell students to use AI to understand their books. You can get the actual real life person to help with that! For free!
Reposted by HeeJin Lee
Students in discussion of uncurated materials is not teaching. Students hanging out together is not teaching. Good teaching is the thing that AI cannot do, while it can mimic a role in the first two. 9/
September 13, 2026 at 11:55 AM
Students in discussion of uncurated materials is not teaching. Students hanging out together is not teaching. Good teaching is the thing that AI cannot do, while it can mimic a role in the first two. 9/
Though I wonder what Harvard’s embrace of AI says about elitism in academia (and/or about Harvard, for that matter, as the standard-bearer of that elitism).
After 90 or so years of democratization of higher ed, the race to calcify prestige hierarchies is accelerating.
www.chronicle.com/article/u-of...
www.chronicle.com/article/u-of...
U. of Chicago Bans Tech, AI in Social Sciences Core Courses
The new restrictions apply to students and faculty members.
www.chronicle.com
August 31, 2026 at 4:53 PM
Though I wonder what Harvard’s embrace of AI says about elitism in academia (and/or about Harvard, for that matter, as the standard-bearer of that elitism).
Learned about Octavia Butler’s KINDRED from a student (plus all of the Dolly news) yesterday, and that might be an American timeslip novel! Added to my to-read list—
Potentially unrelated side note: As someone who works on modern Korean lit,i.e., lit from 20th C and beyond, I gained new perspectives for thinking about the distant past—albeit not as distant as ancient Greece—from watching a “timeslip” K-drama this summer. I wonder whether such narrative frames
one tendency that comes out about period films is the insistence that XYZ moral thought would not have occurred to anyone in the ancient world. to be sure there are moral innovations and changes but the existence of thorough dissatisfaction with the present moral order is not a modern phenomenon
August 26, 2026 at 10:11 PM
Learned about Octavia Butler’s KINDRED from a student (plus all of the Dolly news) yesterday, and that might be an American timeslip novel! Added to my to-read list—
First day of teaching in the books! Grateful to students who took my requests for physical paper books and no AI rule seriously. I loved getting asked about how long they should plan to work on their readings and writing assignments, and how to take good notes on readings.
August 25, 2026 at 9:55 PM
First day of teaching in the books! Grateful to students who took my requests for physical paper books and no AI rule seriously. I loved getting asked about how long they should plan to work on their readings and writing assignments, and how to take good notes on readings.
Reposted by HeeJin Lee
Back to school. ❤️
August 24, 2026 at 4:17 PM
Back to school. ❤️
Really envious of UChicago! chicagomaroon.com/53262/news/s...
Sosc Core to Institute AI Ban, Technology-Free Classrooms This Fall
All social science Core classes will transition to an “analog” approach for the upcoming academic year, restricting in-classroom technology use and banning AI-assisted writing and grading for students...
chicagomaroon.com
August 24, 2026 at 11:42 AM
Really envious of UChicago! chicagomaroon.com/53262/news/s...
TFW your radiators kick in because it’s 56 degrees this AM—wild, given that earlier this month, I lived through 100+ degrees with insufferable amounts of humidity in Seoul!
August 24, 2026 at 10:55 AM
TFW your radiators kick in because it’s 56 degrees this AM—wild, given that earlier this month, I lived through 100+ degrees with insufferable amounts of humidity in Seoul!
Stress-buying secondhand china is a real thing for me, and if my haul from the last two months is any indication, this summer was a bit stressful!
August 16, 2026 at 10:36 PM
Stress-buying secondhand china is a real thing for me, and if my haul from the last two months is any indication, this summer was a bit stressful!
Couldn’t agree more as someone who took a gap year between undergrad and law school and then six years between law school and PhD, all of it rather unplanned for me.
fwiw I always rec taking a break between undergrad and grad school. doing so can help you realize later, if you do get a faculty gig in academia, that all workplaces are sort of hellscape microcosms of broader social issues and that higher ed isn't really unique in this regard.
August 11, 2026 at 12:39 AM
Couldn’t agree more as someone who took a gap year between undergrad and law school and then six years between law school and PhD, all of it rather unplanned for me.
Reposted by HeeJin Lee
I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful
July 31, 2026 at 9:35 PM
I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful
Are sub-skeets a thing? If so, let this be my first—annoyed that ppl are still getting the two Koreas mixed up. ROK/Republic of Korea = South Korea, home of K-pop and K-drama. NOT the Korea with the elder female news anchor in hanbok, that’s the OTHER Korea.
July 31, 2026 at 1:33 PM
Are sub-skeets a thing? If so, let this be my first—annoyed that ppl are still getting the two Koreas mixed up. ROK/Republic of Korea = South Korea, home of K-pop and K-drama. NOT the Korea with the elder female news anchor in hanbok, that’s the OTHER Korea.
Potentially unrelated side note: As someone who works on modern Korean lit,i.e., lit from 20th C and beyond, I gained new perspectives for thinking about the distant past—albeit not as distant as ancient Greece—from watching a “timeslip” K-drama this summer. I wonder whether such narrative frames
one tendency that comes out about period films is the insistence that XYZ moral thought would not have occurred to anyone in the ancient world. to be sure there are moral innovations and changes but the existence of thorough dissatisfaction with the present moral order is not a modern phenomenon
July 29, 2026 at 9:59 AM
Potentially unrelated side note: As someone who works on modern Korean lit,i.e., lit from 20th C and beyond, I gained new perspectives for thinking about the distant past—albeit not as distant as ancient Greece—from watching a “timeslip” K-drama this summer. I wonder whether such narrative frames
Absolutely devastating—not only the layoffs, but also the mandatory AI use for first years. I only grew confident in myself as a writer thanks to the millions of writing assignments I had to do in college, starting with Expos 10.
July 29, 2026 at 12:12 AM
Absolutely devastating—not only the layoffs, but also the mandatory AI use for first years. I only grew confident in myself as a writer thanks to the millions of writing assignments I had to do in college, starting with Expos 10.
At that point in the summer when Seoul feels like walking through hot Jello 🥵
July 7, 2026 at 9:27 AM
At that point in the summer when Seoul feels like walking through hot Jello 🥵
Would my field be included in the ambit of “the humanities,” given its location in area studies?
OK, let's imagine a world where the humanities never goes into crisis in the 2010s. let's say a multi-billionaire tech dies and his will lists "the humanities" as his only beneficiary. what does your field look like?
Here's what I think English would be. /1
Here's what I think English would be. /1
June 28, 2026 at 11:20 PM
Would my field be included in the ambit of “the humanities,” given its location in area studies?
This anecdote provides another reason why I am, and will always be, in Team Human (as opposed to Team AI).
I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +
June 17, 2026 at 8:37 AM
This anecdote provides another reason why I am, and will always be, in Team Human (as opposed to Team AI).
Love being back in the neighborhood I lived in before I moved to LA for my PhD, where I am among many getting my steps in while doing some cardio late in the evening!
June 15, 2026 at 12:55 PM
Love being back in the neighborhood I lived in before I moved to LA for my PhD, where I am among many getting my steps in while doing some cardio late in the evening!
Back in Seoul for the summer, at a different institution than where I’ve been based for the past four years. While I don’t get an office, the library reading room, which mandates a quite strict noise policy (had to get keyboard covers for my laptop),has ample space that I can reserve and work.
June 14, 2026 at 5:42 AM
Back in Seoul for the summer, at a different institution than where I’ve been based for the past four years. While I don’t get an office, the library reading room, which mandates a quite strict noise policy (had to get keyboard covers for my laptop),has ample space that I can reserve and work.