
Contact Information
Biography
Ungsan Kim is Assistant Professor of Asian Cinema in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington.
His research interests and specialization span across Korean cinema, inter-Asian cinema, contemporary Chinese language cinema and Vietnamese cinema, queer cinema and media cultures of Asia, genre films, and experimental cinema. He is currently at work on a monograph, Future Imperfect. The book traces a genealogy of critical and political queer cinema of Asia. With the book, he seeks to demonstrate how contemporary queer Asian cinema provides refreshed conceptions of queerness and temporality and how it engages with audiovisual experimentations as a means of defying normative ways of representing cinematic subjects and progressive history. His next book projects include In the Seething Vortex of Time: Atemporal Drive in Asian Horror Cinema, The Plurality of Korean Cinema, and The Origins of the Renaissance of South Korean Cinema (co-edited with Prof. Sangjoon Lee).
He has taught a wide range of courses, including the history of Korean cinema, Asian horror cinema, queer Asian cinema, Korean directors, East Asian cinema, writing about films, and LGBTQ+ literature. He is also interested in developing and teaching courses on Asian documentary, women’s cinema of Asia, Southeast Asian cinema, and queer media cultures in Asia.
Before joining the University of Washington, he was Assistant Professor of Asian Cinema in the Departments of Film, Television, and Media and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan.
Research
Selected Research
- Butler, Judith. 『지금은 대체 어떤 세계인가』 (What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology). Translated by Ungsan Kim. Paju: Changbi, 2023.
- Kim, Ungsan. “Cruising the Art Museum: On the Migration of Queer Experimental Cinema in South Korea,” JCMS 62.3 (Spring 2023): 191–196.
- Kim, Ungsan. “The Poet and the Theater: Perverse Reading and Queer Poetry.” Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, edited by Heekyoung Cho, London: Routledge, 2022, pp. 488-502.
- Kim, Ungsan. Review of On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis, edited by Jesook Song and Laam Hae. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Journal of Asian Studies 81.1 (2022): pp. 229-230.
- Butler, Judith. 『연대하는 신체들과 거리의 정치: 집회의 수행성 이론을 위한 노트』 (Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly). Translated by Ungsan Kim and Hyosil Yang. Paju: Changbi, 2020.
- Kim, Ungsan. “Stateless Things (2011): Queer Cinema and the Critique of the Heteronormative Nation-State.” Rediscovering Korean Cinema, edited by Sangjoon Lee, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019, pp. 473-485.
- Kim, Ungsan. “The Critical Social Turn of Queer Korean Cinema: Hospitality and the Temporal Economy of Queer Kinship in The Bacchus Lady (2016).” Korea Journal 58.2 (2018): 88-112.
- Kim, Ungsan. "Queer Korean Cinema, National Others, and Making of Queer Space in Stateless Things (2011)." Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 9.1 (2017): 61-79.
- Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. 『박탈: 정치적인 것에 있어서의 수행성에 관한 대화』 (Dispossession: The Performative in the Political). Translated by Ungsan Kim. Seoul: Jaeumgwa Moeum, 2016.