Ungsan Kim (he/him/his)

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 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 pan-Asian emergence of critical and political queer cinema. 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. He is also a lead editor of The Oxford Handbook of Korean Cinema (co-edited with Prof. Sangjoon Lee), which is to be published in 2027. His next book projects include In the Seething Vortex of Time: Atemporal Drive in Asian Horror Cinema, and The Plurality of Korean Cinema.

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.