简介

Suk-Young Kim's research interests cover a wide range of academic disciplines, such as East Asian Performance and Visual Culture, Gender and Nationalism, Korean Cultural Studies, Russian Literature, and Slavic Folklore. Her publications have appeared in English, German, Korean, Polish, and Russian while her research has been acknowledged by the International Federation for Theatre Research’s New Scholar's Prize (2004), the American Society for Theater Research Fellowship (2006), the Library of Congress Kluge Fellowship (2006-7), and the Academy of Korean Studies Research Grant (2008, 2010) among others. Her first book Illusive Utopia (University of Michigan Press, 2010), the winner of James Palais Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, explores how state produced propaganda performances intersect with everyday life practice in North Korea. Her second book DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border (Columbia University Press, 2014) focuses on various types of inter-Korean border crossers who traverse one of the most heavily guarded areas in the world to redefine Korean citizenship as based on emotional affiliations rather than constitutional delineations. In collaboration with Kim Yong, she also co-authored Long Road Home (Columbia University Press, 2009), which explores transnational human rights and the efficacy of oral history through the testimony of a North Korean labor camp survivor. Currently she is working on several projects: Performing Folklore: Syncretism and Storytelling in Nikolai Gogol’s Ukrainian Tales (Northwestern University Press, under review) traces how the performative aspects of live storytelling techniques permeate Gogol’s writing as a dominant narrative force, not only as an exotic instrument to appeal to his contemporary Russian readers, but also as a logical means to assist him in performing his stories live in public. She is also actively conducting research on the intersections of the legacy of the Cold War and the global circulation of Korean popular culture known as “hallyu” — a project which is sponsored by the 2014-15 ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship. She served on the editorial board of the Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia and has been appointed as a senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2014-2016). She spearheads UCSB’s Global Performance Studies Initiative and is a member of the executive committee for the American Society for Theater Research. She has taught at Dartmouth College and Yonsei University International Summer School.