The Korea Institute is pleased to announce the Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellow for academic year 2021-22: Dr. Bo kyung Blenda Im. Bo kyung Blenda Im is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in popular culture and religion in Korea and the Korean diaspora. She deploys a combination of ethnographic, historical, and music-analytical methods to unsettle Western colonial epistemologies – particularly neo-Orientalist constructions of “Asia” – that condition the terms of inclusion and exclusion in the modern world. Her interdisciplinary research primarily addresses music studies and actively dialogues with Korean studies, ethnic studies, religious studies, and anthropology. During the 2021-22 academic year Blenda will work on her book project, Transpacific Belonging: Race, Music, and Faith in Seoul, which reconceives transpacific musical modernity through a restorative chronopolitical framework. Based on extensive fieldwork in Seoul, the monograph examines the co-production of ethnoracial and religious subjectivity in Korean Christian engagements with black gospel and contemporary worship music. Full Announcement available here.