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Department of
Communication Studies

Bohyeong Kim

Assistant Professor

Bohyeong Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, a Dean's Faculty Fellow (2022-2024) in Communication Studies, and affiliated with the Department of Asian Studies. As a scholar of critical media and cultural studies with a particular emphasis on Korea and East Asia, Professor Kim’s research focuses primarily on the relationship between the media, culture, and the capitalist economy. Her first book Critically Capitalist: The Spirit of Asset Capitalism in South Korea (University of Michigan Press, 2025) presents an ethnography of South Korea’s aspiring millionaires to theorize “critical capitalism” as a simultaneous critique and legitimation of capitalism. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Cultural Studies, Television & New Media, Media, Culture & Society, and International Journal of Communication.

Specializations

Typical Courses

Social Media and Everyday Life

Cultural Rhetorics of Film

Rhetoric of Mass Media

Communicating Gender


Representative Publications

Critically Capitalist: The Spirit of Asset Capitalism in South Korea (University of Michigan Press, 2025)

“Global Korean Cinema and the Apocalypse of Asset Capitalism in Concrete Utopia,” Korean Journal of Communication, 2.3 (2025).

“South Korea’s megacorp and super app: Kakao’s paths to market dominance,” Media, Culture & Society. Online First (2024).

 “Gendered Comedy, Pathologized Female Consumers, and Marginal Humor: Kim Saeng-Min’s Receipts.” In Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea, edited by Jesook Song and Michelle Cho, University of Michigan Press. (2024)

“Thrift Television in South Korea: The Long Recession and the Financial Makeover of Female Consumers in Homo Economicus (EBS),” Television & New Media, 23.3 (2022): 257-275. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420987143

“The Ecosystem of a ‘Wealth-Tech’ Culture: The Birth of Networked Financial Subjects in South Korea,” Media, Culture & Society, 42.2 (2020): 207-224. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719853497

“Think Rich, Feel Hurt: The Critique of Capitalism and the Production of Affect in the Making of Financial Subjects in South Korea,” Cultural Studies, 31.5 (2017): 611-633. (Winner of the 2018 Cultural Studies and Stuart Hall Foundation Award) https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2016.1264005

“The cultural cold war goes ‘vulgar’: Radio serial melodrama in post-Korean War South Korea, 1956-1960.” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 3203–3223. Available at: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6280