Yeong Ran KimEmory Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Korean Studies

My research and teaching interests have centered on aesthetic practices by queer and trans activists and artists, forging new kinds of relationalities to survive and thrive against the logic of heteropatriarchal social codes and neoliberal modes of exchange. Drawing together my research in the contemporary queer feminist culture with performance theory, Asian/American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film and media studies, I invite students into the complex perspectives of globalization and transnationalism, in which artmaking and aesthetic experiences play a crucial role in identity and community formations.

I am currently working on a book manuscript titled Queer Unmastery: A Cultural History of Performance, Digital Media, and Social Movements in South Korea. This interdisciplinary project focuses on the emergence of non-normative intimacies, affinities, affections, and alliances in postauthoritarian South Korea over the last three decades. Through close readings of video/film, digital media, visual arts, theater, and other forms of cultural expression and activism, the book highlights the ways in which kwieo (퀴어, “queer”) have become a critical term to mark a significant divergence within social justice and labor movements in South Korea. I am also working on a co-edited volume Queer Feminist Elsewhere: Decolonial Making in Transpacific Korean Art based on the 2021 RISD conference Queer/Feminist/Praxis and the 2024 Sarah Lawrence Conference Queer Translations, which I co-organized to bring together works by scholars and artists in Korea and the Korean diaspora. I have published in TDR: The Drama Review, Pacific Affairs, Korea Journal, The Scholar & Feminist Online, among others.

I earned my Ph.D. in Theater Arts and Performance Studies from Brown University. Before Emory, I was an Andrew W. Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow and an affiliated faculty member in the Filmmaking and Moving Image Arts program at Sarah Lawrence College, offering public programs and courses on community engagement through digital media.