Research

With a background in Music and Film Studies, I received my Ph.D. in  East Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2018, where I  specialized in Korean cinema. My work, broadly speaking, explores  trends and patterns in Korean popular culture as a means of examining  the symbiotic relationship between society and culture. My overarching  approach can be encapsulated in the question: how does Korean culture  document, fictionalize, or even influence the micro-level changes that  are occurring in Korean society? Adding to the rapidly growing canon of  scholarship on Korean cultural studies, I engage mainly with the study  of films and television, while also touching on other mediums such as  webtoons and experimental video artworks.

I am currently working on my first book on representations of the  family in Korean cinema. Going beyond existing scholarship on Korean  cinema which has remained focused on the Korean film industry’s revival  in the late 1990s and its leading genres and filmmakers, my dissertation  turns its attention to the breadth of creativity found in medium-budget  films between the late 1990s until early 2010s, where changes in the  social understanding of the familial and gender concepts, as well as in  the roles of individual family members, were playfully tackled. My  project brings together films and writings on the family in both Korean  and English, analysing the reflections and yearnings that they provide  on social changes of modernisation, democratisation, feminism, and  neoliberalism.

Other projects that I am working on include: an edited collection on  K-dramas, individual articles on Korean disasters movies and body  politics in K-drama, and a second book project on monsters in Korean  popular culture.

Teaching

Prior to joining the University of Hong Kong, I was a Korea  Foundation Visiting Assistant Professor in Korean Studies at Nanyang  Technological University, where I taught courses on Korean media,  culture, and history. I have also taught at the University of Tuebingen  and the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

Education

PhD     East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge
MPhil  Screen Media Culture, University of Cambridge
BA      Music, King’s College London

Selected Publications

Articles

An, J. 2022. Forthcoming. ‘Introduction to Special Section: New Directions in K-Drama Studies.’ Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 14(2)

An, J. 2022. Forthcoming. ‘K-Drama 2.0: Updating Tropes with Intertextuality and Cinematic Visuals in Crash Landing on You.’ Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 14(2)

An, J. 2019. ‘The Lost Childhoods of Korea: Ounie Lecomte’s A Brand New Life (2009) and Kim So-yong’s Treeless Mountain (2009).’ Cross Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 8(1), 19-40. DOI: 10.1353/ach.2019.0001

An, J. 2019. ‘The Korean Mother in Contemporary Thriller Films: A Monster or Just Modern?’ The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 11(2), 154-169. DOI: 10.1080/17564905.2019.1661655

Book Chapters

An, J. 2021. ‘Aliens, Mermaids, and Cartoons: Neoliberal Gender Politics in Twenty-First Century South Korean Dramas.’ In ‘We’ in an Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture, eds. Mary Harrod, Suzanne Leonard, and Diane Negra. Routledge.

An, J. 2016. ‘Blood is Thicker than Water, or is It? Depictions of “Alternative Families” in Contemporary Korean Cinema.’ In Korean Screen Cultures: Interrogating Cinema, TV, Music and Online Games, eds. Andrew Jackson and Colette Balmain. Peter Lang, 35-54.