Nam Center Colloquium Series | Korean Wave in Latin America: K-pop Reception and Participatory Fan Culture

Cosponsored by the U-M Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS)

Korean media have enthusiastically reported the good news about South Korean popular culture’s huge success in distant Latin America. The question is whether its popularity is a substantial transnational cross-cultural reception of Korean culture, or only a fan culture of passing fancy.

Wonjung Min is a professor and head of Korean Studies in the Asian Studies Center of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She holds a doctorate in Latin American Literature and her research areas include intercultural communication between Korea and Latin America, cultural hybridization in identity formation of Korea, Korean popular culture and the impact of history education on post-unification inter-Korean intercultural communication. She has been a Korea Foundation Project Director since 2006, organizing the annual International Conference on Korean Studies and Essay Contest on Korean Studies, Korean Film Festivals, etc. She is the editor of the following books: Korea: An Interdisciplinary Vision (2010), Sowing, Germinating and Blossoming: Young Chileans’ Eye on Korea (2011), Korea: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2012), and A Humanistic Approach to Korean Studies (2014). Her most recent book is Korean Studies Textbook for the Spanish-speaking World: a Critical, Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach.