Jeongwon Kim is a music anthropologist whose primary research interests include K-pop and fandom, Korean music culture, gender, and sexuality. She majored in violin and musicology during her undergraduate studies, with a minor in dance theory. After completing her master’s degree in Women’s Studies at Seoul National University, she moved to the United States, where she earned a second master’s degree in music anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside.

After presenting her doctoral dissertation on Korean female K-pop fandom, she returned to Korea and has been teaching courses on Korean popular culture (Hallyu) and K-pop to international students at Yonsei University. Since the fall of 2021, she has also been teaching the interdisciplinary core course “Gender Practice for Artists” at Korea National University of Arts.

She has published articles on K-pop in journals such as Popular Music, Ewha Music Journal, and Journal of Cultural Industry Studies. Her research on the political and cultural activism of K-pop fans during the candlelight protests demanding the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye was included in The Candlelight Movement, Democracy, and Communication in Korea (Routledge, 2021), part of the Advances in Korean Studies series. She plans to continue studying the intersections of K-pop and fandom with various identities, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race.

Presenter: Jeongwon Kim (Yonsei University)
Discussants: Inhwa Yang (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies), Jongim Lee (Seoul National University of Science and Technology)
Moderator: Jiyoung Seo (Center for Hallyu Studies, SNUAC)