Date: Thursday, November 7, 2024 at 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Venue: Center for Korean Studies Auditorium

This event delves into the impact of celebrated K-Pop boy band BTS, exploring their history, aesthetics, and the fan culture and industry that surrounds them. The collection’s contributors—who include artists, scholars, journalists, activists, and fans—approach BTS through inventive and wide-ranging perspectives to show how one band can inspire millions and provide a broad range of insights into contemporary social and political life. Two of the book's co-editors, Michelle Cho and Vernadette Gonzalez, and one of its contributors, S. Heijin Lee, will discuss the origins and contours of the collection, and their specific contributions to the book.

Speakers:

Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of Korean Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. She is co-editor of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader and the volume Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea, and author of the forthcoming monograph Genre Worlds: Global Forms and Millennial South Korean Cinema. Her public-facing writing appears in such venues as The Los Angeles Review of Books, and she's a frequent commentator on Asian media in outlets ranging from NPR to the CBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the Washington Post.

Heijin Lee is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies atUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In addition to her forthcoming book, The Geopolitics of Beauty: Transnational Circulations of Plastic Surgery, Pop, and Pleasure, Lee is co-editor of Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia(NYU Press, 2019) and Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019). Lee has been featured on National Public Radio’s Code Switch and Throughline, Korea Society’s “K-Pop 101” series, at KCON, and in The New York Times discussing beauty, pop and power.

Vernadette Gonzalez is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (2013), Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (2021) and co-editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i (2019).

The event is free and open to all. For further information, including information regarding disability access, telephone the Center for Korean Studies at 808-956-7041. This event is in part supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Strategic Research Institute Program (AKS-2020-SRI-2200001).

The University of Hawai‘i is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution.