Jinhee Choi

Biography

Jinhee Choi was educated at Seoul National University (South Korea) and completed a B.A. and M.A. in Aesthetics. She earned two PhDs—one in Philosophy and the other in Film Studies—at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (United States) and was a post doctorate/ visiting professor in East Asian Studies and Film Studies at Yale University. She previously taught at Carleton University (Canada) and the University of Kent before moving to King’s College in 2011.   Jinhee Choi was educated at Seoul National University (South Korea) and completed a B.A. and M.A. in Aesthetics. She earned two PhDs—one in Philosophy and the other in Film Studies—at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (United States) and was a post doctorate/ visiting professor in East Asian Studies and Film Studies at Yale University. She previously taught at Carleton University (Canada) and the University of Kent before moving to King’s College in 2011.  

Research Interest

"Currently working on a monograph on girlhood, tentatively entitled Forever Girls: Girlhood and Contemporary South Korean Cinema, I approach girlhood as a sensibility, focusing on the representations of girls and their sensibilities manifest in contemporary South Korean cinema of such genres as horror, “chick flicks”, thrillers, social problem films, and costume dramas. The dual roles of the Mother (and matriarchy) and wife, guided by as well as challenging, the framework of the Confucian ideology that posits women should aspire to the status of “wise-mother-good-wife” (賢母良妻), has been the focus of major scholarship on Korean cinema, in particular melodrama and horror of the 1950s and 60s.  In contrast, masculinity has provided an adequate perspective for the discussion of the impact of the military dictatorship on the Korean national psyche of the 1980s and 90s.  Girls, however, have never been at the centre of scholarship on Korean cinema.  In Forever Girls, I will reorient the focus and direction of current scholarship on classical and contemporary Korean cinema, and examine the reasons behind why girls begin to embody, and have become the subject of, the modern and/or contemporary history of Korea; and help to underscore the contradictions of the contemporary social inequality and tensions existing between parent-child generations.  "