Professional Title: Professor of Communication and Media
Email: jinahkim@ucmerced.edu
Office: ACS 261
Education:
PhD, World Literatures and Culture, University of California, San Diego
MA, Cultural Studies, University of California, San Diego
BA, English, Columbia University
Research Interest:
Memory and Violence
Media Technologies
Critical Demilitarization Studies
Feminist Media Studies
Ending the Korean War
Asian American and Transpacific Studies
Bio:
Jinah Kim is a media and critical race studies scholar whose research and teaching focuses on the American Century in Asia, decolonizing Korea, transpacific feminist activism, and legacies of US militarism in the Asia-Pacific. Her work explores state regulations of memory surrounding histories of violence, and in turn how artists, activists and everyday people intervene against permanent war, state violence, and military occupation. Her publications include Postcolonial Grief and the Afterlife of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke UP, 2019) and a co-edited special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies journal, Interventions in Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies. She is the recipient grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, California Civil Liberties Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She is currently working on three book projects: Against Forgetting: Transpacific Organizing for the Comfort Women, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea and Authoritarian States and Diasporic Memoryscapes. She is on the editorial board of American Quarterly Journal; Asian Feminist Studies Journal and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. In the Communication and Media Studies Program at UC Merced she teaches courses on Popular Culture, Communication and Media Technologies, Media and Memory, Asian Diasporic Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Intercultural Communication Studies.
Recent Publications:
Jinah Kim and Nitasha Sharma, Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies, Issue 7, Volume 2, February 2022
Jinah Kim, Postcolonial Grief and the Afterlife of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, January 2019) Reviewed by: American Literary History, Choice, Journal of World History, MELUS, Journal of Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Situations, Cultural Studies Review, Lateral, Society & Space
Jinah Kim, “Diasporic Memoryscapes and and Authoritarian Regimes,” (American Quarterly, Volume 77, Number 4, December 2025)
Jinah Kim, “Transpacific Noir: Literary Nuclear Entanglements,” Diaspora and Literary Studies, Angela Naimou ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) December 2022
Jinah Kim, “The Insurgency of Mourning: Sewol Across the Transpacific,” Amerasia Journal, Vol 46: Issue #1 (September 2020): 84-100
Courses Taught:
Fall 2026: Topics in Media Studies: Popular Cultures
Spring 2027: Topics in Media Studies: Communication and Media Technologies
Spring 2027: Intercultural Communication Studies
