Jeehey Kim's research encompasses the history of photography, visual culture, and film studies in East Asia. Kim is currently working on two book projects: Imagining Korea through Photography, on the history of photography in Korea, and Photography and Death: Funerary Photo-Portraiture in East Asia. She also has been writing articles on vernacular photographic practices as well as on documentary films and visual culture in relation to the Cold War and to gender politics in East Asia.
As a curator, Kim has organized exhibitions such as the recent “Pyongyang Bookstore,” at Seoul Metropolitan Library, which presented North Korean artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Kim earned her doctorate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a dissertation on funerary portrait photography in East Asia. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.
Publications
Imagining Korea through Photography, London: Reaktion Books; Chicago: University of Chicago Press (forthcoming)
“Photography and Ghost Marriage in East Asia,” Photography and East Asian Art, eds. Wu Hung and Chelsea Foxwell, Chicago: Art Media Resources and Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, 2021, 143-170.
“Pyongyang Bookstore: North Korean Artists through Their Books,” in Pyongyang Bookstore, exh. cat., Seoul: Han Sangeon Yeonghwa Yeon’guso, July 2018, unpaginated.
“Wandering Ghosts of the Cold War,” Journal of Korean Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall, 2017): 413-431.
“Death and Photography: Politics of Funerary Photo-Portraiture,” in The 2012 Seoul Photo Festival: Village Community and Photo Archives, exh. cat., Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul City Hall, Seoul Museum of History, November-December 2012, 235 – 247.
“Korean Funerary Photo-Portrait: Vernacular Photographic Practice as Parallax,” Photographies, Vol. 2, Issue 1 (2009): 7 – 20.
“Deadpan Rhetoric: We don’t have an alibi,” in Geoffrey Batchen, Jeehey Kim, and Jung Joon Lee, Deadpan: Photography, History, Politics, exh. cat., New York: The Graduate Center, City University of New York, May 2008, unpaginated.
“Difference in Feminism: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Post-Colonialism,” The International Journal of the Arts in Society, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (2007): 81 – 92.
Courses
ARH 324 –Introduction to the History of Photography
ARH 324 — 20th-Century Photography
ARH 424A & 524A –History of Photography: 19th-Century Photography
ARH 596 –Vernacular Photographies
ARH 424A & 524A –History of Photography: Black Lives Matter
ARH 596 –Photography and Empire
ARH 424C & 524C –History of Asian Photography
ARH 596 — Global Indigenous Photography
ARH 480 & 580 –Postcolonialism and Contemporary Art in East Asia