Overview
Jahyon Park is a specialist in modern and contemporary Korean media, cinema, and online literature. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the representation and reception of gender images and minorities in contemporary Korean media, particularly focusing on the reception of new media webtoons and their transmedia content to complicate genre logic and reception theory. She published a book chapter, “Webtoon and Intimacy: Reception of North Korean Defectors’ Survival Narratives,” on webtoon audiences’ reactions to the survival narratives of North Korean refugees in South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea in 2019. She is currently working on a book chapter, “Crying Men Watching Webtoons: Misaeng and Korean Male Audiences,” in the volume Here Comes the Flood: Perspectives of Gender, Sexuality, and Stereotype in the Korean Wave now being prepared for publication by Lexington Books in 2022. She is also working on revising her dissertation for publication. She attempts to refine and sharpen the conceptualization of the relationship between gender and technological developments. Given the current world-wide interests in Korean popular culture, she highlights the trends and impacts of globalization and localization in this book project. Before rejoining Asian Studies, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies with global racial justice research priorities.
Research Focus
Modern and Contemporary Korean Literature and Popular Culture
Webtoons and Media Reception
South Korean Cinema and Global Genres
Gender and Sexuality
Melodrama and Masculinity
North Korean Refugees and Global Migration
Publications
“Crying Men Watching Webtoons: Misaeng and Korean Male Audiences,” in Here Comes the Flood: Perspectives of Gender, Sexuality, and Stereotype in the Korean Wave, edited by Marcy Tanter and Moisés Park, Lexington Books (forthcoming, 2022)
“Webtoon and Intimacy: Reception of North Korean Defectors’ Survival Narratives,” in South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea, edited by Youna Kim, Routledge, 2019: 162-175 (supported by the Korean Government, UNESCO).
“The Challenge of Cyber Novel as a New Form of Literature: My Sassy Girl (Yŏpkijŏgin Kŭnyŏ),” The Journal of English Cultural Studies, Vol. 5. No.1, 2012: 149-185.