Ji-Hyun Ahn 

I am an Associate Professor of Communication in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma. As a global media studies scholar, my research and teaching mostly concern media globalization and racial politics in East Asian media and popular culture.  

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I am particularly interested in examining how media practices have facilitated the re-imagination of national identity from a global media perspective. My first book, Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media (2018), studied how the increase of visual representation of mixed-race Koreans formulates a particular racial project in contemporary South Korean media. I am currently working on a new research project that explores anti-Korean sentiment and the rise of (new) nationalism in postcolonial East Asia.

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I won several Top Paper Awards for my work and have published numerous book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals including Media, Culture & Society, Cultural Studies, International Communication Gazette, and the Asian Journal of Social Science. I had previously served as a  Distinguished Speaker (2020-2023)  at the Distinguished Speakers Bureau for the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.