[36][37] In 2000, several months after surviving her first suicide attempt as a graduating senior at Yale, and shortly after starting a PhD program in the Department of English at Stanford University, Chu was sexually harassed and raped by the William Robertson Coe Professor in American Literature at Stanford University Jay Fliegelman, for whom she was working as a teaching assistant and research assistant.
[41] Nonetheless, the law required Stanford University to conduct an independent investigation that resulted in significant sanctions against Fliegelman, including suspension for two years without pay.
[44][41][45][46][47] Subsequent to being abused at Stanford, Chu changed her name from Jennie to Seo-Young,[48][47] changed her field from Early American Literature to science fiction, and reapplied to PhD programs, transferring in 2001 to Harvard University, where she worked with Elaine Scarry and earned a PhD in English and American Literature and Language in 2007.
[31][54][64][38][55][65][66][67][4][68][17][35] Her publications include "Survivor-Shaped Specters and Gaps,"[23] "Excerpts from an Anti-Standardized '수능': A Design-Fictional Approach to Korea,"[69] "I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue in F Minor,"[70][11] "Dear Stanford: You Must Reckon With Your History of Sexual Violence,"[17][25] "Welcome to the Vegas Pyongyang,"[71] Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?
A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation,[8] "Hwabyung Fragments,"[72] "Are Postmodernism and MeToo Incompatible?,"[73] "Science Fiction and Postmemory Han in Contemporary Korean American Literature,"[14] "The DMZ Responds,"[12] "A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major,"[7] "M'어머니,"[74] "Dream of the Ambassador, 12/21/2016,"[75] "The Lyric We,"[75] "Two Koreas, in the Key of Emily Dickinson,"[75] "Chogakpo Fantasia,"[76] "Dickinson and Mathematics,"[77][78] "Emoji Poetics,"[79] "Tiny Art Museum for the Floater in My Eye,"[80] "I, Stereotype: Detained in the Uncanny Valley,"[81] "Dystopian Surface, Utopian Dream,"[82] "Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue In H Minor,"[16] "Old Typewriter in a Field,"[83] "Translator of Soliloquies,"[84] "Utopias Misplaced: The Cost of Outsourcing Dystopian Poetics to North Korea,"[85][86][87][88] "Hypnotic Ratiocination,"[89] "The Dream Life of Waste: Archaeologies of the Soul in the Key of Capitalism,"[90] "jogakpo window (7 feet x 4 feet),"[91] and "Imagining an Asian American Superhero of North Korean Origin.
"[92][9] Chu is also a contributing writer to the experimental film I See You and You See Me (2021), which tells "Stories of Queens residents during the time of the coronavirus.
[99] Her work has been cited by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker[100]; by Amanda Gorman in Call Us What We Carry; by Mia You in Poetry;[101] and by Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings.
In 2017, 2018, and more recently, "A Refuge for Jae-in Doe" and Chu's advocacy for survivors have sparked dialogue about MeToo in academia, particularly at Stanford.