Seonah Kim

Assistant Teaching Professor Seonah Kim (she/her) studies global discourses about racial and gender identity in media that are shaped by historical and socioeconomic structures of inequality, such as militarization, imperialism, neoliberalism, and whiteness. Through research and teaching, she challenges representational inequality, particularly constructed around Asian identity, by finding new or other ways of thinking about Asian identity through a transnational and decolonial lens.

She is currently working on her first book, Desiring Darkness: Overdetermining Skin-Darkening Beauty in South Korea, where she explores the push and pull between local, regional, and global power relations that form and transform cultural meanings of artificially and cosmetically darkened skin and beauty in South Korea. Her research has appeared in various scholarly journals, including International Journal of Communication, Television & New Media, Communication, Culture, & Critique, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, and Women’s Studies in Communication. She earned her PhD from the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, Seattle.