Hieyoon Kim's research asks how audiovisual media and its ecology evolve during times of political uncertainty and what cinematic practices and expressions are used to undermine the status quo. Her research agenda is based in Korea and is organized around three questions: 1) What kind of a different world do the various participants in the media ecology struggle for, and what roles do they see for audiovisual media (cinema, for instance) in this struggle? 2) How do they challenge blockages of public expression and access to public resources, as well as institutionalized hegemonic codes that appear natural and sensible? 3) How does media expand public spaces in such a way that alternative imaginations of the social fabric can flourish?

Her first book, Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea (University of California Press) examines how Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways amid political turbulence from liberation through the decades of military rule (1945–1987). With acts ranging from making films that brought the dispossessed to the screen to bootlegging as an effort to redistribute resources under the state’s control, they explored ideas and practices that exceeded the limits of the statist notion of democracy and of the cinematic medium. Combining archival research, film analysis, and interviews, she traces how they constructively reinvented the political fields constituted by films, the practices of production and circulation that propelled these films, and the platforms on which they were shown. Their work, she argues, foregrounds a utopian vision of democracy in which the ruled could represent themselves and exercise their rights to access resources free from state suppression, a vision that was transient but that nonetheless disrupted the status quo. As the first account of the history of film activism in post-1945 South Korea, the book contributes to the growing field of Korean film studies. By expanding our definition of radical film discourses and practices in the Cold War, it also broadens the current understanding of film activism.

Hieyoon Kim has also written about such topics as film historiography, archives, and memory. An essay published in the Journal of Asian Studies provides a new interpretation of a seminal historiographical text in Korean film studies in order to rethink the relationship between Korean nationalism, Japanese colonialism, and the postcolonial present. In an article published in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, she offers a fresh look at the history of film preservation with the case of South Korean government’s aspiration for and struggle toward acquiring membership in the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) vis-à-vis Cold War politics. Her Korea Journal piece concerns how recent popular cinema reflects upon the public memory of the democratization process in South Korea. All these works, in one way and another, attempt to disarticulate the seemingly coherent cinematic medium and its institutions, mapping their many iterations across a widening array of social and cultural phenomena.

Hieyoon Kim is currently completing her second book titled Time After Gwangju: Audiovisual Media and Affective Witnessing (under contract with University of California Press, expected to be out in fall 2028). The book examines how contemporary Asian and Latin American artists engage the unresolved afterlives of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising through experimental audiovisual practices. Through close analysis of multimedia installations and documentary works, it claims that these works do not simply represent past political violence but reshape the temporal conditions through which it can be encountered in the present. By generating affective, embodied, and atmospheric modes of experience, they invite viewers into ethical forms of spectatorship grounded in sustained attention to histories they did not personally witness. Drawing on feminist, queer, and Black visual culture studies, the book reconceptualizes mediated witnessing as an ongoing relational and sensory process. Essays based on this research have appeared or are forthcoming in Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea, and Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past.

As a scholar of dissident culture and politics, Hieyoon Kim is deeply committed to decolonizing her fields. One such effort is her collaboration with film historians, archivists, and practitioners across the world to critique film theory's western imperialist foundations. For more information, please visit the website of the "Global Circulations of Film Theory Networking Project." Kim is also participating in several campus-wide research initiatives, including in the Initiative on Sexualities and Genders. 

Society of Cinema and Media Studies; Association for Asian Studies; Modern Language Association; International Association for Media and History; Cultural Studies Association; American Historical Association 

In the classroom, Hieyoon Kim draws upon her interest in the intersections of culture and politics, inviting students to experiment with a range of materials and interpretive methods. In “Women Make Movies: Feminist Practices in Asia,” students not only reinterpret the canonical texts of feminist film theory but also engage with recent feminism activism and filmmaking from across Asia. Throughout the semester, students collaboratively produce their own manifesto of feminist filmmaking and propose a new festival program that foregrounds their definition of women’s cinema. In “Korean Cinema,” students discuss films from the silent to the contemporary era to trace the development of the film industry and various genres within the context of Korean and global film culture. Her students reexamine well-known films and genres with fresh lenses and explore previously undervalued areas of interest. The course’s major assignment is to propose a film series and research for it over the course of the semester. In this way, students are encouraged to acknowledge and redress the gap in the study of Korean cinema that privileges already-established texts and auteurs. Outside the classroom, she has organized and spoken at workshops on Journal Article Writing and The Academic Job Market.

* Students who would like to request a Letter of Recommendation, please fill out this form.