Perry's publications examine the revolutionary and queer cultures of 20th century Japan and Korea. 

Perry's research focuses on lefist cultural practices and the historical relationship between Japan and Korea in the 20th century. His first book, From Wŏnso Pond is a translation of, and critical introduction to, Kang Kyŏng-ae's 1934 newspaper novel In'gan munje, a classic of literary realism in the canons of both South Korea and the DPRK, which was issued in 2009 by The Feminist Press. His second book, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea and the Historical Avant-Garde examines the influential proletarian cultural movement that flourished in 1920s and 1930s Japan, and shows how the movement opened up new critical spaces in the intersections of class, popular culture, childhood, gender, and ethnicity. His third book is an anthology of Japanese fiction by Sata Ineko, a celebrated writer with a complicated relationship to the Japanese Communist Party. The book, which includes an extensive introduction, is called Five Faces of Feminism: Crimson and Other Stories.

His fifth and sixth books, A Century of Queer Korean Fiction and 한국 퀴어 문학: 한 세기, part of the 2023 Text and Translation series by the Modern Language Association, are anthologies of queer writing from Korea which include Korean short stories published between 1918 and 2017 as well as a scholarly apparatus that helps to contextualize a wide body of Korean works, including pieces by celebrated authors such as Yi Kwangsu, O Chŏnghŭi, and Sang Young Park, as well as the North Korean writer Yi Kiyong. These books are part of a broader research project on the transnational dimensions of queer Korean culture, which has resulted in an international conference organized by Perry at Brown University, the guest editorship of a special queer issue of Azalea: A Journal of Korean Literature and Culture, stand-alone published research such as "Forms of Attachment: Forms of Attachment: Ardent Female Intimacies in the 1920s" (Routledge, 2022), as well as the mentorship of numerous undergraduates interested in queer culture and translation. A book on the "Bad Gays of Japan" is also on the horizon.

Professor Perry has also been writing a book called "From Across the Genkai Sea: Japanese Literature and the Korean War," a work which will examine a body of writing and cultural activism from the 1950s and beyond in an effort to understand Japan's experience as host and headquarters for US forces during the tragic conflict that broke out in its former Korean colony. The project aims to shed light on how different groups experienced the Korean War affectively in Japan: members of the ideologically split Communist Party, the divided ethnic Korean community in Japan, everyday citizens employed in and nearby US bases on the Japanese islands, and the Japanese colonialists repatriated from the Korean colony after WWII. By reading media reports, letters to the editor, fiction, propaganda and poetry written by and about members of these different communities—whose experiences lay in many ways on the margins of mainstream Japan—Professor Perry's research not only offers a new transnational perspective on America's "forgotten" Korean War, but also an examination of how this perspective set in place narratives of class and ethnicity in Japan that would continue to be influential for decades to come. Spin-off scholarship includes the published chapters “Early Narratives of the Korean War” (2019) and "朝鮮戦争期のジェンダーと帝国主義の記述–––佐多稲子の場合 [Writing Gender and Imperialism during the Korean War: The Case of Sata Ineko]" (2022), as well as upcoming work on the "bad gays" of Japan: "Neocolonial Desire, Violent Sex, and the Construction of Gay Japan" and "Yoshiya Nobuko: Making Japanese Babies in Hanoi".

2023 Brown University Faculty Development Fund for intensive Vietnamese Language Study in Ho Chi Minh City.

2016-17 American Council of Learned Societies, held at the University of Cambridge

2013-14 Japan Foundation Research Fellowship, Tokyo.

2013 National Endowment for the Arts, Translation Fellowship.

2011 Visiting Scholar, Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

2010-11 Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley, Center for Japanese Studies.

2007-08 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Harvard University (jointly offered by The Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies & The Korea Institute)

2007 Korean Literature Translation Institute Translation Award

2006 Center for East Asian Studies Dissertation Write-up Grant, University of Chicago.

2003-05 Fulbright Dissertation Research Grant, University of Hokkaido, Sapporo, Japan.

2003-04 International Communications Foundation Graduate Translation Fellowship.

2002-03 Korea Foundation Research Fellowship, Seoul, South Korea.

2001-02 Korea Foundation Language Training Fellowship, Seoul, South Korea.

1997-2001 University Unendowed Fellowship, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

A Century of Queer Korean Fiction. Translated and Introduced by Samuel Perry. New York, NY: Modern Language Association, 2023.

한국의  퀴어  문학:  한  세기. Edited and Introduced by Samuel Perry. New York, NY: Modern Language Association, 2023.

“Introduction,” Special edition of Queer Korean Literature, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture, vol. 15, 2022.“Introduction,” Special edition of Queer Korean Literature, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture, vol. 15, 2022.

“朝鮮戦争期のジェンダーと帝国主義の記述–––佐多稲子の場合”[Writing Gender and Imperialism during the Korean War: The Case of Sata Ineko.] Japanese translation by Osaki Harumi. In Iida Yūko, et. al. ed.『プロレタリア文学とジェンダー: 階級・ナラティブ・インターセクショナリテ』[Proletarian Literature and Gender: Class, Narrative and Intersectionality]  (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2022).

“Forms of Attachment: Ardent Female Intimacies in the 1920s.” In Heekyoung Cho, ed. Routledge Companion to Korean Literature. (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 473-487.

“Early Narratives of the Korean War.” In Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov, eds., Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding. (Bloomsbury Academic: London, UK, 2019), 55-66.

Crimson and Other Works by Sata Ineko. Translated and Introduced by Samuel Perry. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2017.

Review of Light and Dark by Natsume Soseki. Translated by Jonathan Nathan. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014. In Translation Review 91 (Spring 2015).

Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea and the Historical Avant-Garde Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014.

“The Context and Contradictions of Kang Kyŏng-ae’s Novel In’gan munje.” Korean Studies, volume 37 (2013): 99-123.

"Feminizumu wo aka de kaku: Kan Keiai no 'Ningen mondai' ni okeru bungakuteki mujun" (Written in Japanese). In Kobayashi Takiji shinpojiumu hōkokushū. Otaru: Otaru Shōka daigaku shuppankai, 2012.

Review of Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature by Karen Thornber. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. In Comparative Literature 64:3 (Summer 2012).

Translation of Sata Ineko, "White and Purple." Winner of the 2010 William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature. Published May, 2011, on-line with introduction at: http://ceas.uchicago.edu/japanese/Sibley_Translation_Project.shtml

Review of The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan by Ken C. Kawashima. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. In the International Journal of Asian Studies 7, no. 2 (July 2010): 242-44.

"Kyōshitsu no shakai kankei—Nihon to shokuminchi jidai no Chōsen hantō ni okeru kakumeiteki jidō no bungaku hyōshō" ["Social Relations of the Classroom—Literary Representation of Revolutionary Children in Japan and Colonial Korea"], translated into Japanese by Shimamura Teruo, in Iida Yūko ed. Shōnen shōjo no poritikkusu, Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2009.

From Wŏnso Pond: A Korean Novel by Kang Kyŏng-ae. Translated and introduced by Samuel Perry. New York: The Feminist Press, 2009.

"Korean as Proletarian: Ethnicity and Identity in Chang Hyŏk-chu's 'Hell of the Starving.'" Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 14:2 (Duke University Press, 2006): 279-309.

2016-17 American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship

2013-14 Japan Foundation Research Fellowship

2013 National Endowment for the Arts, Translation Fellowship

Association of Asian Studies

American Literary Translation Association

Modern Language Association

I have taught classes at Brown on East Asian popular culture, Korean and Japanese literature, revolutionary culture, queer culture, childhood, women's literature, and the practice of translating fiction and poetry. In the future I look forward to teaching classes on Vietnamese literature as well.