This dissertation project, entitled “Intelligentsia under Empire: Proletarian Authors, Socialist Feminists, and the Fate of Korean Intellectuals in Japan, 1920-1945,” traces interconnections between Korea and Japan during Japan’s colonization of Korea by examining networks that linked Korean students with Japanese universities, creating a class of what I call “comprador intellectuals.” As Korean graduates trained in a small cluster of Tokyo area universities, these semi-colonial figures capitalized on their elite status as important intermediaries between colonial powerbrokers, and are crucial in understanding the ramifications of asymmetries in education, the complex relationship between class aspiration and cultural assimilation, and the exigencies of colonial agency. The initial half of my dissertation traces some of the institutional, social, and cultural trends surrounding the emergence of comprador intellectuals. These first three chapters focus on how Japanese policy marginalized Korean educational institutions throughout the 1910s, how this drove aspiring Korean students to Tokyo who then formed their own exchange student communities throughout the 1920s, and how Korean graduates from Tokyo universities became a mass media phenomenon in newspapers, magazines, and literature. The second half of my dissertation focuses on two groups of comprador intellectuals – socialist feminists and proletarian authors – and how they made the most of their education, linguistic abilities, and transnational social networks to shape the history of both Korea and Japan.