Monica Cho
Monica W. Cho is a Visiting Scholar at the Korean Studies Institute. Her research areas include modern and contemporary Korean literature and culture, women’s writings, madness, feminist ecological criticism, and gender studies. She received her PhD from the University of California, Irvine in East Asian Studies with emphases in Critical Theory and Feminist Studies. Monica is currently working on a book project (Reclaiming Our Time: Six Decades of Madness in Korean Women’s Writings) which examines how madness functions as a literary device and a method of feminist and ecocritical critiques of postwar South Korean modernity in Korean women writers.
Juwon Kim
Juwon Kim is a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korean Studies Institute. Drawing from critical race and gender studies, postcolonial studies, and transpacific studies, her research examines the history of race, racialization, and racism as a social construct in the twentieth-century South Korea and Korean diaspora. She received her PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she was a 2025–2026 recipient of the Korea Foundation Scholarship for Graduate Studies. Her work on race, transwar colonialism, and the Korean War has been published or is forthcoming in Verge: Studies in Global Asias and Journal of Korean Studies.
Jeongin Lee
Jeongin Lee works at the intersection of sonic practice, embodied performance, and feminist inquiry, exploring how listening mediates political subjectivity, memory, and everyday life. Drawing on ethnomusicology and performance studies, her research attends to the relational, affective, and sensory dimensions of sonic experience in militarized and socially contested spaces. She received her PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in performance studies from Texas A&M University, and a B.A. in music from Ewha Womans University in Seoul. Her work has been recognized with the Vida Chenoweth Prize, an Honorable Mention for the Seeger Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Martin Hatch Prize from the Society for Asian Music. As a postdoctoral fellow in the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities, she is affiliated with the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and KSI.
Raymond Kyooyung Ra
Raymond Kyooyung Ra is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he also received his PhD. Drawing on his earlier experience as a writer-producer in the Korean media industry and his interdisciplinary scholarly training in cinema and media studies, performance studies, feminist and queer studies, and global Blackness studies, Ray’s broader research program recovers racial histories and queer traces from times, places, and media conventionally imagined as inhospitable to minoritarian life. Ray is currently working on a book project, Intimacies of Queerness: Shades, Bodies, and Images of the Transpacific, 1970–, which reconstructs the inadvertent movement of the gay dance “waacking” from the underground disco clubs of 1970s Los Angeles to Korea through U.S. military broadcasting infrastructure. The first chapter of the monograph, “On Epiphytism, or Reimagining the Minor,” received the Mori-ASPAC Paper Prize, and Ray was subsequently invited to present the work on the “Rising Scholars in Asian Studies” panel at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference with the sponsorship of the Council of Conferences.