Graduate Students

Zavi Kang Engles is a Ph.D. student in American Studies and Ethnicity. She writes, walks, and tends to two cats in Tovaangar / Los Angeles. She holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University. She is the Managing Editor of Apogee Journal. As an American Studies and Ethnicity PhD student, she researches affect and embodiment in Asian American literature and Korean/Korean American shamanism.

Seungjin (SJ) Han is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. His research interests are in international relations and comparative politics in East Asia, with a focus on political leadership in South Korea and Japan. He received a BA in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in Asian Studies from Georgetown University. He is also a fiction writer with publications in Smokelong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Literary, AAWW’s The Margins, and elsewhere. His works have received nominations for Best Small Fictions 2022 and Best of the Net 2024.

Yuan Yuan Hsu is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the politics of defense technology and export controls in U.S.-allied states, with a regional focus on South Korea. Her dissertation explores how technologically advanced allies navigate U.S. security expectations amid growing domestic capabilities, focusing on the political and institutional conditions that shape patterns of strategic restraint. Her work draws on extensive field research in South Korea, including elite interviews and archival analysis. Before pursuing her doctoral studies, Yuan Yuan graduated summa cum laude from National Taiwan University and completed her M.A. in Political Science at National Taiwan University and the University of Missouri–Columbia.

Damin Jung is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. Her research lies at the intersection of American and Comparative Politics, focusing on how elite framing and public behavior interact through media narratives. She is particularly interested in the dynamics of democratic backsliding and its broader implications for gender representation and political equality. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, her work aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how political communication shapes democratic resilience and public perceptions across different institutional contexts.

Jaewuk Kim is a Ph.D. student in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. His research interests lie in modern and contemporary South Korean avant-garde literature and film, particularly with a focus on international surrealism. His broader interests include diaspora and transnational studies, speculative and science fiction, and translation theory and praxis. He is currently translating a volume of South Korean fiction with Kaya Press, and he has also published his own fiction and poetry in PRISM international and Volume Poetry.

Sojeong Kim is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her research explores family demography, child development, and work–family conflict. She is particularly interested in examining changes in family formation and structure, as well as their impact on social stratification, with a focus on changes in women’s education and employment. Kim is currently conducting research on how low fertility and resulting shifts in the female population structure influence women’s employment rates in Korean society.

Hyejoo Lee is a PhD Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research interests lie in Korean film and media studies, specifically at the intersections of South Korean cinema, online cultures, and gender since the turn of the millennium. Her dissertation reconciles the motif of vanishing women in contemporary film, on one hand, and the explosion of feminine images online, on the other, theorizing how this seeming paradox reveals the ways in which media and technological change inform newly gendered subjectivities to navigate our ubiquitous computerized age.

Jiwon Park is a Ph.D. student in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies. She studies histories of South Korea’s high-tech industries, stretching from the astronomical state and corporate investment in semiconductors after 1973 to the present. Drawing from an archive of corporate media, she asks how digital technologies lent themselves to the aesthetic and ideological project of South Korea’s postcolonial developmentalism, corporate allegories, and their integral racial and gendered imaginaries. Previously, she received her M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from USC and B.A.S. in English and Statistics from UCLA.

Raymond Kyooyung Ra is a Ph.D. candidate at the Division of Cinema and Media Studies. His research interests are centered on media studies, performance studies, feminist and queer theory, Korean cultural studies, and global Blackness studies. Ray’s doctoral dissertation studies the dance performance genre ‘waacking’ that originated from the 1970s Los Angeles underground gay disco scene and made transpacific crossings to South Korea in the context of post-WWII geopolitics and media infrastructures. He is also a dance and performance practitioner, having hosted international workshops in Asia and Europe as well as worked with local institutions and communities based in Los Angeles, such as CultureHub, One Institute, and Whacking Los Angeles.

Kayeon Roh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. Her research interests center on international relations of historical East Asia. She works on political concepts and theories that constitute international systems, how they evolve, and are translated on the inter-regional level. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation project focuses on ‘emperor,’ ‘empire,’ and related concepts in pre- and early modern East Asia as well as in a wider global context, up to the early twentieth century. She is also interested in qualitative methodology in political science and history of social sciences.

Dillon Sung is a Ph.D. candidate and Provost Fellow in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Through conversations with Asian and American studies, Dillon’s dissertation “The Mad Relations of Korean Statelessness” is a genealogical inquiry into instantiations of twentieth-century Korean stateless subjectivities through an examination of the juridical and historical linkages across the colonial Korean era, the militarization of madness during the Korean War, North Korean defectors in South Korea, and undocumented Koreans in the U.S. Her research also contributes to scholarship on regimes of truth, sovereignty, and Asian racialization by drawing on U.S. Cold War immigration policies and rights-oriented international advocacy that determine the possibilities of movement, rights, and agency for Korean stateless subjects. Most recently, Dillon was awarded the 2025-26 Russell Endowed Dissertation Completion Fellowship from USC’s Graduate School. She is also a multimedia artist, memory worker, and community organizer—stewarding art and community-based projects through funding such as the 2020-21 Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellowship. 

Tian Jing Teh is a PhD candidate and Provost Fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research explores inter-Asian island literature and media, with a focus on the transcoastal cultural networks linking East and Southeast Asia across the Western Pacific. Bringing together literary analysis, visual culture, and environmental humanities, his work examines how islands serve as aesthetic and ecological mediators of modernity, memory, and migration. Within Korean studies, Tian Jing is particularly interested in Korean Island Studies—Jeju Island and other peripheral sites as nodes of transnational and ecological connection.

Fiona Yuanjing Xu is a Ph.D. student in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include modern Korean literature, Buddhist studies, science fiction, and gender and sexuality studies. Her recent projects have focused on modern and contemporary cultural representations of Buddhism in South Korea, particularly the way female monastics, lay communities, and popular cultural imaginations engage with Buddhist thought to rearticulate gender norms and seek liberation. She is also developing a research focus on Buddhist speculative fiction, examining how speculative narratives reimagine Buddhist thought in relation to embodiment and marginalized identities.

Daphne Yang is a PhD candidate studying International Relations and Methods. She is interested in East Asian political economy and the intersection between gender and security. Particularly, her dissertation addresses how gender issues in East Asia affect political mobilization through security measures, namely military conscription. Daphne graduated cum laude from Pomona College with a B.A. in International Relations. Prior to joining the world of academia, she worked as a middle school Social Studies teacher in East Palo Alto and currently holds an M.Ed as well as a California Preliminary Teaching Credential.

Furkan Benliogullari is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses primarily on international security, international law, and legal claims in territorial disputes. His research project explores the effect of the legalized territorial claims on the strategic interactions between disputant states and third-party actors.

Sam Gerstle is a PhD Candidate at Boston University. His primary field is International Relations, with a focus on the political economy of security. His dissertation is on industrial mobilization for war and why some states are better at translating economic resources into military power than others.

Ji Won Jung is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on alliance politics, with a particular emphasis on burden-sharing and reassurance signals. Her current research examines how a powerful ally’s interest toward a junior ally shapes burden-sharing arrangement.

Stephen Schick is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California, researching Chinese politics through the lenses of comparative and international political economy. His dissertation investigates how the expansion of privately held wealth poses political risks for authoritarian regimes, and how political elites shape institutions to manage the tradeoffs between economic growth and domestic stability.

Trang Vu is a third-year PhD student in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. She studies signaling, coercive bargaining, intrawar negotiations, war termination, and crisis decision-making. Her dissertation project focuses on beliefs and coercion, with an empirical focus on the Vietnam War.

Chamseul Yu is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Texas A&M University. His research centers on international conflict and cooperation, with specific focus on alliance with great power rivalry, and audience costs. His ongoing projects examine alliance politics from the perspective of minor powers—so-called protégés—in asymmetric alliances, and how domestic politics shape the causes and outcomes of international interactions including economic statecraft.