Soyi Kim (Ph.D. 2022 University of Minnesota) is the inaugural LB Korean Studies Research Scholar for the East Asia Program.

• Dr. Kim has her doctorate in Comparative Literature and Art History (Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
• She works at the intersection of comparative cultural and media studies, art history, history of medical science, gender studies, East Asian studies, and Korean and Korean diasporic studies.
• In addition to her Ph.D., Dr. Kim holds an M.A. (2014) in the History of Art from the San Francisco Art Institute and a B.A. (2011) in Art Studies from Hongik University.
• She was a Fulbright Scholar while at the San Francisco Art Institute and held an ACC_R art residency at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, in the Fall of 2020.

Dr. Kim will spend the 2023-2024 academic year at Cornell revising for monograph publication her dissertation “Viral and Visceral: Feminist Media, Art, and Neocolonial South Korea” and developing her second scholarly project, on biophobia in Korean and Korean diasporic art.

Her work creatively brings together urgent questions about the ethics and politics of epidemiology and a critical humanities approach to aesthetic problems in art and digital cultures. Dr. Kim’s work, while situated in visual studies, is truly interdisciplinary, and seeks to place Korean art and visual culture in historical and cultural context. While her work is not history of medicine per se, it engages with biopolitics as Koreans encountered first Japanese, and then American imperial occupation, and a diverse series of medical and bureaucratic interventions which have directly affected the bodies and health of Koreans.