Ungsan Kim (he/him/his)

Ungsan Kim is Assistant Professor of Asian Cinema in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature with an adjunct appointment in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington. An interdisciplinary scholar of cinema and media studies, he specializes in inter-Asian cinema, Korean cinema, Asian genre films, experimental cinema, and queer cinema and media cultures of Asia. Kim's research considers how Asian cinema has survived regional crises, including censorship, political turmoils, cultural setbacks, and the demise of movie theaters in general as well as how it constitutes an inter-Asian network of audio-visual cultures. 

His first monograph in progress, Future Imperfect: Queer Asian Cinema and the Temporality of Survival, historicizes and contextualizes the emergence of critical and political queer cinema across Asia since the 1980s. Focusing on arthouse and experimental narrative films and documentaries in the region, it examines how critical and innovative queer cinema has been shaped and innovated itself, while surviving various crises and oppressions in the region. His second monograph project considers the eccentric and deviant representation of time as a salient feature of Asian horror genre films. It explores how Asian horror cinema has served as a critical means of representing political and cultural dissent in the region, while understanding motifs of deviant time in such films as potentially queer. In addition, he is currently co-editing an anthology, The Oxford Handbook of Korean Cinema (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He regularly teaches on queer Asian cinema, global horror cinema, Korean film history, and Korean filmmakers.