Meet our 2022-2023 NextGen Scholars
Myojung Chung is an assistant professor of journalism and media advocacy at Northeastern University. Her primary research focuses on the intersection of media, public opinion, and policy making. She is particularly interested in the spread and consequences of misinformation as well as countermeasures and policies to combat misinformation. Prior to academia, she worked as a journalist at Yonhap News Agency, Korea’s leading news outlet, and a strategic communication practitioner at SK Telecom, the largest telecommunications provider in Korea. She also has first-hand experience working at the UN Headquarters and the Korean National Commission to UNESCO. She holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from Syracuse University, a M.A. in Regional Studies-East Asia from Harvard University, and a B.A. in Anthropology from Seoul National University.
Hannah June Kim is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) at Sogang University. Previously, she was an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. Her research examines public opinion, gender, and democracy in East Asia, with a focus on South Korea. Her work has been published in the Journal of Politics, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Pacific Affairs. She received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine in 2019.
John Kuk is an assistant professor of Political Science, focusing on American politics, political behavior, racial, economic, gender, and housing inequality. He uses computational methods, such as automated text analysis and machine learning, experiments, and causal inference methods for observational data to study these topics. His primary research area examines how economic inequality deepens racial polarization, how the housing rental market perpetuates residential segregation, and how politicians propagate racial and economic inequality through policy. He has published in the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Demography, Housing Policy Debate, Economics & Politics, American Behavioral Scientist, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego in 2017, and B.A. and M.A. in political science from Seoul National University.
Jungmin Kwon is an associate professor of digital culture and film studies in the School of Film at Portland State University. Her research and teaching interests include digital culture, film and media, gender and sexuality, media industry, fans and audiences, media celebrities, and Korean/East Asian popular culture. She is the author of Straight Korean Female Fans and Their Gay Fantasies (2019, University of Iowa Press). Her works have appeared in Television and New Media, the International Journal of Communication, and Journal Fandom Studies. Currently, she is writing her second book, titled The (In)Visibility Dilemma: Queer Media Cultures and Voices in Contemporary South Korea. Kwon received a Ph.D. in media and communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an M.A. in Communication and BAs in International Relations and Communication from Seoul National University.
Claire Seungeun Lee is an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a member of the University’s Center for Internet Security and Forensics Education and Research (iSAFER). Her research centers on deviance and crime in cyberspace, cybersecurity, social media, and the social implications of social and new technologies. Her recent projects address cybercrime in the Global North and South, cyberterrorism, online-offline mobilization, and online hate speech, among others. An international and multilingual scholar, she has served in the educational, media, and legal sectors in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and Seoul, and worked for the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP), a leading South Korean think tank. Her research has been supported by grant awards from the National Security Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the Overseas Koreans Foundation. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the National University of Singapore, and her M.A. in Sociology (of China) and B.A. with honors in Chinese Studies from the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea.
Sojeong Lee is a Global Security Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee. She is also the Managing Editor of International Studies Quarterly, a flagship journal of the International Studies Association since 2018. She also worked as a teaching assistant of Time Series I course at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) summer program for several years. She has been published in several prominent international relations journals, including Journal of Peace Research and International Area Studies Review. She received her M.A. and B.A. in Political Science from Seoul National University before attending graduate school at the University of Iowa. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science in 2018 from the University of Iowa, where she worked as a research assistant for the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project and a managing editor for International Studies Review. As a graduate student, Lee won the Lynne Rienner Award for Best Paper Presented by a Graduate Student at the International Studies Association in 2017.
Bridget Martin is an urban geographer and political geographer researching the US-Korea alliance through the lenses of land, territory, terrain, and sovereignty. Her book project Land Power: Real Estate and the US Military in Korea, traces the logics, techniques, laws, and ambiguities that made widespread American militarized land dispossessions possible during the U.S. military occupation of southern Korea and during the Korean War, and it critically examines the more recent process of US military land returns in the context of Korea’s highly commodified real estate environment. Bridget is currently the inaugural SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences at the Korea Institute, Harvard University. She will join the University of Mississippi campus as the Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Korean Studies in January 2023. Bridget completed her Ph.D. in Geography with a Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. During her final year of graduate study, she was a predoctoral Fellow in the US-Asia Grand Strategy Program at the University of Southern California Korean Studies Institute. She holds a Master’s in Politics from The New School for Social Research. Bridget’s writings have appeared in journals such as the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Political Geography. Along with Lisa Sang-mi Min, she is also the co-organizer and co-facilitator of the DMZ Field School, a week-long workshop on writing and methods for anthropologists and geographers that held its inaugural program in February 2022 with the support of the Research Institute of Korean Studies.
Lily McElwee serves as a fellow in the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). At CSIS, she also supports the CSIS-Chumir Global Dialogue, a high-level dialogue project on strategic competition and the future of world order. Her research focuses on global governance, EU-China relations, and transatlantic cooperation on China. She is a DZ Bank fellow on transatlantic business and finance with the American Council on Germany. Her work has appeared in International Affairs, The Diplomat, St Antony’s International Review, and E-International Relations. She holds a DPhil in China studies and an MSc from the University of Oxford and a BA with honors in political science from Stanford University.
Kyuri Park is a postdoctoral fellow at FSI-Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University. Her research lies primarily in international security and cooperation, with a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific. Kyuri is particularly interested in examining the pattern of security cooperation between great powers and secondary states and drawing out the implications for regional order, stability, and the US grand strategy. By shedding light on joint military exercises, her current book project explores how East Asian secondary states are responding to the rise of China and why they are responding the way they are. Her work on South Korea’s middle power diplomacy has appeared in International Politics. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC), M.A. in Asian Studies at Georgetown University, and B.A. in International Studies at Ewha Womans University. Previously, Kyuri was a US-Asia Grand Strategy predoctoral fellow at the USC Korean Studies Institute. She also served as a contributing author of ‘Korea-Japan relations’ in Comparative Connections published by Pacific Forum.