Areum Jeong

Areum Jeong is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator of Korean and Korean diasporic cinema, literature, popular culture, theatre and performance. 

She holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, MA in Performance Studies from New York University, and BA 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, Korea Journal, Korean Theatre Review, Media Convergence Research, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, New Theatre Quarterly, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Theatre Journal among others. 

Her first monograph, Beyond the Sewol: Activist Theatre and Performance in South Korea and the Diaspora, examines how performance documents death, loss, and memory in South Korea and diasporic communities. Through a close reading of various types of performative works that commemorate the Sewol ferry disaster of 2014—theatre productions, exhibitions, interactive memorial events, site-specific public performances, street protests, and even K-pop music videos—the research shows that these works have come to constitute a kind of collaborative public counter-memory that pushes back against dominant narratives about the disaster and contributes to a form of activism through commemoration. This diverse corpus of performance has emerged as a central mode through which Korean artists, often working in collaboration with Sewol families and survivors, have created a public memory archive countering official versions of the event. Furthermore, theatre and performance have provided an arena through which the project of commemorating the Sewol has been linked by activists to broader demands for changes in politics and society, especially around issues of government accountability, redress for victims, and public empathy for survivors. By identifying and analyzing a multi-media collection of performative works commemorating the Sewol, this book reveals the ways activists and artists mobilizing performative strategies have labored to transform the meaning of the Sewol from an unresolved national trauma into a catalyst for creating a safer, fairer, and more caring society. Dr. Jeong has received competitive research grants from the 4.16 Foundation, Academy of Korean Studies, and the American Society for Theatre Research for this project, and has published her early findings in peer-reviewed journals Performance Research, New Theatre Quarterly, and Theatre Journal. Beyond the Sewol will be published in September 2025 via 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. Rather than framing fans primarily as consumers of K-pop, the book insists that K-pop fan practices and activities constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop's explosive global popularity, but also K-pop's cultural impacts, politics, and horizons of possibility. Over the past three decades, the K-pop fandom and its activities have expanded, intensified, and diversified along myriad dimensions, assuming novel social, technological, and economic forms, some of which are unique to K-pop, and some of which reflect broader cultural and industrial logics of globalized mass entertainment culture. She argues that K-pop fans, in performing deokhu—a Korean term connoting an "avid fan"—perform a materialization of affective labor that also seeks to produce good relationships between asymmetrically positioned actors in the K-pop ecosystem. Through an autoethnography of becoming a K-pop deokhu, she connects their experiences to generations of K-pop fans, showing simultaneously how fandom practices have shifted over time and the intricacies of fan labor participation. This personal connection paved the way for participant-observation and co-performer witnessing methodologies in the study, which crucially allowed for collaborating with fans whose communal pursuits have been stigmatized by dominant discourses that denigrate their activities as solely addictive, uncritical, and wasteful. Her genre-spanning corpus of fan activities and analyzing its contexts and contents represents an important contribution to the making of a fan archive that is also an archive of affective labor. Dr. Jeong has received competitive research grants from the Academy of Korean Studies and the American Society for Theatre Research for this project. K-Pop Fandom will be published in February 2026 via 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, Atlantic, BBC, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), CNN, Huffington Post, Korea Herald, La Tercera, Les Echoes, Marie Claire, NBC, NYLON, South China Morning Post, Teen Vogue, VOA: Voice of America, and Washington Post among others.