Hieyoon Kim

Areas of Expertise:

Dissident culture; film and media activism; film historiography and archive; experimental and avant-garde cinema; feminist filmmaking and programming; Korean cinema and popular culture

Education:

Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles

Research Interests:

In her research, Hieyoon Kim [she/her] asks how cinema and its ecology evolve during times of political uncertainty and what cinematic practices and expressions are used to undermine the status quo. Her research agenda is based in Korea and is organized around three questions: 1) What kind of a different world do the various participants in the film ecology struggle for, and what roles do they see for cinema in this struggle? 2) How do they challenge blockages of public expression and access to public resources, as well as institutionalized hegemonic codes that appear natural and sensible? 3) How does cinema expand public spaces in such a way that alternative imaginations of the social fabric can flourish? Her first book, Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea, examines how Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways amid political turbulence from liberation through the decades of military rule (1945–1987). She is currently working on her second book titled Hereness: The Gwangju Uprising in the Twentieth-First Century Media, which examines new constellations of aesthetics and politics in recent multimedia projects on the Gwangju uprising. In addition to these two book-length projects, she has also written about such topics as film historiography, archives, and memory. Her articles have appeared (or will appear) in the Journal of Asian Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Feminist Media Histories. She is also one of the participants of the Global Circulations of Film Theory network, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Selected Publications:

Books

• Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea (forthcoming in October 2023, University of California Press)

Refereed Journal Articles

• “How Women in OTT Are Redefining Screen Culture: Purplay and a New Wave of Feminism in South Korea,” Feminist Media Histories (forthcoming in Winter 2024)
• “Reckoning with a Feminist Experimental Film Collective: Khaidu in 1970s South Korea,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (forthcoming in Summer 2024)
• “On 1987: South Korean Cinema in the Era of Re-democratization,” Korea Journal, 60.3 (Fall 2020): 273–294
• “Living with a Postcolonial Conundrum: Yi Yŏngil and Korean Film Historiography,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 78.3 (2019): 601–620
  • Author Interview published on the Journal’s #AsiaNow blog
• “Archive in the State of Emergency: Realizing Film Preservation in Cold War South Korea,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 39.1 (2019): 96–113

Edited Volumes

• “Round and Around: Traces, Gazes, and the Archival In-Between,” in Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past, eds. Vinzenz Hediger, Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis (Lüneburg: Meson Press), forthcoming in 2023
• “T’edŭ k’onŏnt’ŭwa chŏnhu namhanŭi yŏnghwamunhwa [Theodore Conant and the Postwar Film Industry in Cold War Korea],” in Ipangini kilokhan hankuk, yŏnghwa: siŏtoŏ k’onŏnt’ŭ k’ŏlleksyŏn [Korea, Cinema, Seen from A Foreigner’s Eyes: Theodore Conant Collection] ed. Korean Film Archive (Seoul: Hyunsilbook, 2016)
• “On the Postwar Film: Interview with Theodore Conant,” (trans)  in Ipangini kilokhan hankuk, yŏnghwa: siŏtoŏ k’onŏnt’ŭ k’ŏlleksyŏn [Korea, Cinema, Seen from A Foreigner’s Eyes: Theodore Conant Collection] ed. Korean Film Archive (Seoul: Hyunsilbook, 2016)
• “Transregional Screening of Homeless Angels and Conflicting Positions of Colonial Korean Cinema,” in Koryŏ Film Company and the New Filmic Order of Total War Period, 1936-1941  ed. Korean Film Archive (Seoul: Hyunsilbook, 2007)

Translations

• “Selected Poems of Choi Young-mi,” in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Vol. 14 (Forthcoming in May 2021)

Teaching Interests:

Upon her arrival at UW-Madison, she has taught a broad range of classes, including:

• Women Make Movies: Feminist Practices in Asia (Undergraduate/Graduate Capstone Seminar)
• Archive and Ephemera: Through a Lens of Asia (Graduate Seminar)
• Korean Popular Culture (Undergraduate Course)
• The Two Koreas: Politics of Aesthetics (Undergraduate/Graduate Seminar)
• History and Memory in South Korean Cinema (Undergraduate Seminar)
• K-pop: History, Politics, Culture (Undergraduate Survey)

Current and former students: request a letter of recommendation