Mishana earned a PhD in Black Studies from Northwestern University, with graduate certificates in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory. Her interests include Black feminist theory, feminist theory, popular culture, and the politics of diversity and inclusion. As a postdoctoral fellow in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, she will be working on the department’s annual Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute.
Trained in cultural studies and art history, Soyi Kim specializes in contemporary feminist art history, media studies, and the body politics of modern and contemporary South Korea and the Korean diaspora. She is the inaugural LB Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the East Asian Program at Cornell University (AY 2022-2024). She earned her doctorate in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature with a minor in Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2022). As a Fulbright scholar, she received her Master’s degree in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at San Francisco Art Institute (2014).
Before starting her Ph.D. program, she worked as a docent coordinator at the National Museum of Korea (2014-2015), and a volunteer worker and a satirical cartoonist for a civil organization, Cultural Action, located in Seoul, Korea (2007-2010). She has also held an art residency at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, in Fall 2020.
She is currently working on her first book project "Against Health: Feminist Art in Contemporary South Korea and the Korean Diaspora," which examines the troubling rhetoric and image of the body that Korean and Korean diasporic artists critically employ as a tool for their critique of the notion of public health. Additionally, she is developing a second project on biophobia in Korean and Asian diasporic art. Her scholarly contributions include essays on Korean diasporic artists such as Anicka Yi, Jane Jin Kaisen, and Soni Kum. Her work has been published in OMNES: The Journal of Multicultural Society, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and Cultural Critique Online.
Gender, Sexuality Feminist Studies