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. On April 16, 2014, the Sewol ferry capsized off the southwestern coast of South Korea, killing 304 people, including 250 students. The helplessness that many Koreans and others felt at the sinking was sharpened by the ways the Korean government mishandled the disaster, which has become the most galvanizing event in contemporary South Korean history. Throughout this rollercoaster of national trauma, public outrage, hope for change, and broken promises, an activist movement has taken shape among artists working through the medium of performance to process the disaster, commemorate its victims, and advocate for public change. Beyond the Sewol is the first book to spotlight this creative fluorescence of performative work, which spans the genres of theatre productions, exhibitions, interactive memorial events, site-specific public performances, street protests, and even commercial K-pop music videos. Korean artists, often working in collaboration with Sewol families and survivors, have created a public memory archive that counters official versions of the event. These performances have provided an arena through which activists have linked the project of commemorating the Sewol 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 multimedia collection of performative works commemorating the Sewol, this book reveals the ways in which 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. Beyond the Sewol has been published in September 2025 via the University of Hawai'i Press. https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/beyond-the-sewol-activist-theatre-and-performance-in-south-korea-and-the-diaspora/

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. K-Pop Fandom will be published in February 2026 via the University of Michigan Press. https://press.umich.edu/Books/K/K-Pop-Fandom3

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 Atlantic, BBC, CNN, Huffington Post, NBC, NYLON, Teen Vogue, and The Washington Post among others.