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John (Song Pae) Cho
John (Song Pae) Cho is a PhD Candidate in Socio-cultural Anthropology in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation, Precarious Freedoms: Korean Gay Men and the Internet in Neoliberal and Neofamilial South Korea, examines how the (South) Korean state’s neoliberal and neofamilial policies have generated precarious market-based freedoms for Korean gay men, where they have economic freedom to consume in a hidden gay (virtual) market but not the political freedom to be out. Selected publications include "The Wedding Banquet Revisited: Contract Marriages Between Korean Gays and Lesbians" in Anthropological Quarterly (2009), which won best graduate paper awards from The Society for East Asian Anthropology and The Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists, both of the American Anthropological Association; "Stuck in South Korea: Linguistic Capital, Transnational Markets, and Korean-American Male English Teachers in Seoul", forthcoming in a special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics, "Globalization, Multilingualism, and Identity in Transnational South Korea"; and a co-authored essay, "The History of the Korean Gay and Lesbian Movement: From Identity to Community", also forthcoming in Paul Chang and Gi-wook Shin’s edited book project, Korea Democracy and Civil Society.
Michelle Cho
Michelle Cho is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, with emphases in Visual Studies and Critical Theory. Primarily interested in the way the affective register of the geopolitical is expressed via contemporary cultural production, her research concerns genre transformation in the context of contemporary South Korean screen cultures, cultural translation in cinema, transnational East Asian cinema, the affect and temporality of modernization in East Asia, documentary media, and phenomenological and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity.
Regina Yung Lee
Regina Yung Lee is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. She studies anglophone, francophone, and sinophone texts, fandom and transformative works, technologies of subjectivity, and feminist methodologies. Despite several more recent contenders, Coffee Prince is still her favorite k-drama.
Sohl Lee
Sohl Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at University of Rochester, U.S.A. She is currently working on her dissertation that investigates contemporary artworks by artists who practice sociopolitical interventions into nationalism, urban development, and contemporaneity in South Korea. Her research interests include contemporary visual culture in East Asia, discourses of alter-modernities, institutional critique, and curatorial practices. Her publications have appeared in Yishu: Journal for Contemporary Chinese Art, and she is currently guest-editing a special issue for the journal Invisible Culture, entitled "Spectacle East Asia: Translocation, Publicity, Counterpublics". This spring, she was based in Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where she taught courses on modern and contemporary Asian visual arts.
Jenny Wang Medina
Jenny Wang Medina is a Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University in East Asian Languages and Cultures, focusing on Modern Korean Literature and Culture. She is currently in Seoul as a Fulbright IIE Fellow to begin research on her dissertation, which deals with Korean literature and popular media in the post-IMF era with an eye towards the transformation of Korean society following democratization in the late 1980s. She is also a translator of Korean literature, and through this, has become interested in how institutional support for international cultural exchange in Korea has affected literary production, and more specifically, how this may have changed the character of the literary establishment
Jee-Eun R. Song
Jee-Eun Song is a Ph.D Candidate in Cultural Studies Graduate Program and Teaching Assistant in the department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her primary areas of research include questions of transnational consumer cultures, food practices, and globalization in Asia, with a particular focus on the recent emergence of commercial coffee houses in South Korea. In her dissertation entitled, "Building an Empire One Cup at a Time: Cultural Meaning and Power of Starbucks in Korea", she is specifically interested in the political economy of coffee for the development of consumption practices in South Korea and the complex meanings attached to circumscribed leisure environments for negotiating the advent of "globality"--the global nature of social relationships and interdependencies--and the continuing contradictions of U.S.-Korea relations. She has a BA in English Literature and American Studies from the University of New Hampshire.
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