Name: Juhn Ahn
Affiliation: University of Michigan
Bio:
Juhn Y. Ahn is associate professor of Buddhist and Korean Studies and Director of the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea (2018). His current research focuses on the economic history of Korea during the Koryŏ period (918-1392), reading practices in Song-dynasty (9160-1279) Chan Buddhism, and the cultural history of weather and wealth during the early Chosŏn period (fifteenth century) in Korea.
Name: Ji-yoon An
Affiliation: University of British Columbia
Bio:
Dr. Ji-yoon An is an Assistant Professor of Modern Korean Popular Culture at UBC. She holds a PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge and has held academic appointments in Europe and Asia before joining UBC. Her research examines South Korean film and television, with particular attention to how popular media documents, fictionalizes, and shapes social change in Korea. She is currently completing a monograph on South Korean cinema from the 1990s to the 2010s that uses the family as a lens for periodizing this era.
Talk: “Made in Korea” to “Made by Koreans”
Name: Yong-Chool Ha
Affiliation: University of Washington
Bio:
Yong-Chool Ha is a Russia and Korea specialist and Korean Foundation Professor at the Jackson School of International Studies. His research interests are late industrialization, Industrial Revolution, and changing elite-mass relations in late industrializing countries. His recent publications include: The Dynamics of Strong State (SNU Press, 2006), Late Industrialization, the State and Tradition: the Emergence of Neofamilism in Korea (2007, CPS), Colonial Social Change (ed.) (U. of Washington Press, 2013), The International Impact of the Colonial Rule in Korea (UW Press, 2019), and Late Industrialization, Tradition and Social Change in South Korea (U. of Washington Press, 2024).
Talk: Beyond Western Paradigms: From Indigenization to Deprovincializing Korean Studies
Name: Hajin Jun
Affiliation: University of Washington
Bio:
Hajin Jun is the James B. Palais Assistant Professor of Korean History at the University of Washington. Jun’s research and teaching focus on modern Korean history, the Japanese empire, and non-Western Christianities. Her forthcoming book explores ritual change and the nexus of religion and political power in colonial Korea.
Talk: Religion and the Limits of Empire in Colonial Korea
Name: Soo-Hyung Kim
Affiliation: University of Washington
Bio:
Dr. Soo-Hyung Kim is a professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington, where he holds the Byron and Alice Lockwood Endowed Professorship in Forest Resources. Dr. Kim received his BS and MS degrees in agronomy and crop science from Seoul National University and earned his PhD in ecology at UC Davis. He studies how plants cope with stress such as drought, from a single leaf to a whole ecosystem, and how helpful microbes living inside plants can give them a boost. In his lab, he pairs hands-on experiments with computer models that simulate how crops grow to help improve yields while minimizing the environmental impacts of agriculture.
Talk: 적지적작: Right Climate, Right Soil, And Right Crop - A Crop Modeling Approach
Name: Ross King
Affiliation: University of British Columbia
Bio:
Ross King earned his PhD from Harvard in Linguistics and serves as Professor of Korean in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His main research interests are Korean historical linguistics, Korean dialectology, the history of Korean linguistics and linguistic thought, and the history of language, writing and literary culture in the ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’.
Talk: Korean Language, Literature, & Linguistics Before 1910 and Since 1990: One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward?
Name: Jungmin Kwon
Affiliation: Portland State University
Bio:
Jungmin Kwon is a professor in the School of Film at Portland State University. She explores digital culture, film and media, and media industries and fan practices, with a specific focus on Korean/East Asian popular culture through feminist and queer lenses. She authored Straight Korean Female Fans and Their Gay Fantasies (2019) and is currently writing her second book, titled In Between (In)Visibility: Queer Media Cultures in Contemporary South Korea.
Talk: Contested Popularity: Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Transnational K-Culture
Name: Steven Lee
Affiliation: University of British Columbia
Bio:
Steven Lee is an associate professor of history at UBC. His research focuses on Korea’s relations with the United States in the early Cold War and the Korean conflict. In addition to modern Korean history he teaches in the university’s international relations program, especially a course on twentieth century world history.
Talk: The Evolution of Korean Studies in Canada: An International History
Name: Yookyung Lee
Affiliation: Boise State University
Bio:
Yookyung Lee is an instructor in the Korean program at Boise State University, where she teaches Korean language and courses on contemporary Korea, Korean culture and civilization, and Korean pop culture. With support from four Korea Foundation grants, she established two of these courses, helping build Idaho’s only Korean Studies program. Her work focuses on Korean language pedagogy and on expanding Korean Studies through interdisciplinary collaboration.
Talk: Korean Studies Without a Korean Community: Building from the Classroom Up in Idaho
Name: Susanna Lim
Affiliation: University of Oregon
Bio:
Susanna (Soo Jung) Lim is Associate Professor of Russian and Korean Studies at the University of Oregon. She is currently working on a book, Racing the Subempire: Race, Modernity, and South Korea in the Global Cold War, which examines how Koreans translated and negotiated global racial hierarchies in the making of modern South Korea.
Talk: Racing the Subempire: Race, Modernity, and South Korea in the Global Cold War
Name: HyeRyoung Ok
Affiliation: University of Oregon
Bio:
HyeRyoung Ok is an Associate Teaching Professor in Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. As a media studies scholar, HyeRyoung specializes in the digital screen culture and transnational flow of popular culture in the East Asian context, focusing on the issues of aesthetics and cultural significance of diverse digital video practices such as mobile phone content service, web series, and AI filmmaking.
Talk: AI Filmmaking - Theory and Practice
Name: Tuong Vu
Affiliation: University of Oregon
Bio:
Tuong Vu is professor of Political Science and founding director of the US-Vietnam Research Center at the University of Oregon. His research has focused broadly on the comparative politics of state formation, development, and revolutions in East and Southeast Asia.
Talk: Robust Republican Institutions in South Korea Viewed from South Vietnam
Name: Hyeyoung Woo
Affiliation: Portland State University
Bio:
I am Professor and Chair of Sociology, and Director of the Institute for Asian Studies (IAS) at Portland State University (PSU). As a sociologist, my research examines status attainment in education, work, and family, and its associations with health and well-being across the life course, focusing on populations in both the United States and Korea. As Director of the Institute for Asian Studies (IAS), I promote greater knowledge and understanding of Asia and advance the study of Asia and Asian America. Last year, I launched the PSU Korean Outreach, Research, and Education (KORE) Initiative to establish comprehensive Korean Studies programs at the University and expand opportunities for research, education, and community engagement.
Talk: Advancing Sociology through Research on Gender, Family, and Health in Korea and Building Korean Studies at Portland State University
Organizers
Name: Dong Hoon Kim
Affiliation: University of Oregon
Bio:
Dong Hoon Kim is a media historian and cultural studies scholar whose primary research interest lies in excavating film and media history to uncover the historical, ideological, and discursive formations of visual culture. His current research focuses on colonial cinema, socialist cinema, transnational media, media spectatorship, and East Asian film, media, and popular culture. He is the author of Eclipsed Cinema: The Film Culture of Colonial Korea (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and the co-editor, with Travis Workman and Immanuel Kim, of The Bloomsbury Handbook of North Korean Cinema (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025).
Name: Jina Kim
Affiliation: University of Oregon
Bio:
Jina E. Kim is Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. Professor Kim’s work brings together literary studies, cultural history, media studies, and critical theory to investigate how new technologies, cultural forms, and transnational networks shape Korean modernity and its global afterlives. Her research interests span comparative colonialism, sound studies and radio history, media and technology, intermediality, global and transnational Korean literature, and Korean diaspora studies. Her scholarship explores the cultural and literary consequences of empire, migration, mediation, and technological transformation in Korea and across the Korean diaspora.
Name: Gyoung-Ah Lee
Affiliation: University of Oregon
Bio:
As an archaeologist, Gyoung-Ah Lee investigates the foodways, traditional ecological knowledge, and human-environmental dynamics in East Asia. Her research spans the globe, and she has conducted archaeological work in Australia, Canada, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Korea. More recently, she has been developing the archaeological project on Jeju Island in Korea, and her team pursues a deep understanding of Jeju cultural heritage in a long-time scale. Since 2007 she has been based at the University of Oregon, as a member of the faculty of Anthropology.