College of Visual and Performing Arts Dean bruce d. mcclung has announced the appointment of Gina Kim as Assistant Professor of East Asian Art History.
Dr. Kim is an art historian whose research focuses on modern and contemporary East Asian visual culture and media in transnational circulation. Her work engages broader questions of borderland imperialism, diaspora, and feminist visibility, with a focus on print culture, exhibitions, film, and digital media.
Kim’s forthcoming book, (Un)Making Manchukuo: Aesthetic Frontiers and the Visual Politics of Manchuria under Japanese Rule, 1920s–1945, examines media circulation, colonial knowledge production, and transnational aesthetics in Manchukuo (1932–1945), Japan’s client state in Northeast China. She is developing a second book project, Beyond Fujoshi: Korean BL Comics and the Global Circuits of Desire, which focuses on Korean webtoons and fan culture to explore how women creators and audiences across global contexts engage platform-based media to reimagine gender, intimacy, and community.
Dr. Kim’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Sumitomo Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Korea Foundation, and the Japan Iron and Steel Federation. Her work has been published in Manchuria Studies and Oxford Grove Art Online, and she has co-authored an exhibition catalogue at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
She has taught at Lewis & Clark College, the University of Pittsburgh, and Wake Forest University. Her teaching spans East Asian and global art history, including courses on Japanese art, manga and anime, and transnational visual culture and media, with an emphasis on object-based learning and critical visual analysis.
Gina Kim holds a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego, an MA in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Oregon, and a BEd in Education from Seoul National University of Education.
