Areum Jeong is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator of Korean and Korean diasporic cinema, literature, popular culture, theatre and performance.
She holds a doctorate in theater and performance studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, master's degree in performance studies from New York University, and bachelor's degree in English literature from Ewha W. University.
Prior to joining Arizona State University, she has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, University of California, Santa Barbara, Seoul Women’s University, Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute, and Ewha W. University.
Her writings are published in the Asian Theatre Journal, Film International, GPS: Global Performance Studies, Journal of Modern English Drama, Korea Exposé, Media Convergence Research, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, New Theatre Quarterly, Studies in Theatre and Performance, The Korean Theatre Review, and Theatre Journal among others.
Her first monograph, Beyond the Sewol: Activist Theatre and Performance in South Korea and the Diaspora, provides a close reading of various types of performances that commemorate the Sewol Ferry disaster of 2014--exhibitions, memorials, site-specific performances, stage productions, street protests, and even K-pop--and shows that these works have come to constitute a kind of collaborative public counter-memory that pushes back against forces of government censorship, media bias, online smear campaigns, and other more subtle forms of forgetting and mis-remembering that proceeded the initial horror of the Sewol Ferry disaster. Beyond the Sewol is under contract with the University of Hawai'i Press.
Her second monograph, K-pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today, is a study that centers K-pop fans and their labor. The research argues that fan practices and activities constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop’s explosive global popularity but also K-pop’s cultural and social impacts and horizons of possibility, which includes its cultural politics. In particular, the research shows that K-pop fans perform a kind of materialization of affective labor, which can be seen in diverse processes, from generalized, collective, and communal fan activities to de-centralized, individually specific labor that represents individual fan’s personalities and performances of care. K-pop Fandom is under contract with the University of Michigan Press.
As a cultural translator and collaborative deviser of performance, she also provides English-Korean interpretation and translation and organizes seminars and talks with artists and scholars who specialize in Korean and Korean diasporic visual arts.
Based on her research and teaching, she has been asked to share her expertise on Korean culture to media outlets such as the AFP (Agence France-Presse), Al Jazeera, AP (Associated Press), Arirang, BBC, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), CNN, La Tercera, Les Echoes, Marie Claire, NBC, NYLON, South China Morning Post, Teen Vogue, The Atlantic, The Korea Herald, Voice of America, and the Washington Post among others.