Announcing the 2025-26 Korea Foundation-Korea Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korea Institute, Dr. Chaeyoung Lee

Dr. Chaeyoung Lee’s book project, Music and Freedom Across the Border: Exploring the Music-Making of North Korean Defectors in South Korean Capitalism, examines the intersections of music, freedom, labor, neoliberalism, the state, borders, and imagination. Drawing on ethnography, historical research, and music analysis, she investigates how North Korean defector musicians navigate diverse musical genres and pursue livelihoods within South Korea’s market-driven society. Her work highlights both the freedoms and constraints these musicians face within neoliberal and state-sponsored frameworks, tracing their transitions into roles as gig workers, media figures, and government-promoted national heroes whose staged performances integrate cultural elements from both Koreas, including “capitalist” and “Juche” singing styles. Taken together, these cases demonstrate that while defector musicians engage in varied musical practices in the South, their pursuit of freedom remains circumscribed by a state-constructed, 'artificial' market.

Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. in Musicology and Ethnomusicology from Boston University, her M.A. in Ethnomusicology and Asia Pacific Studies from the University of Toronto, and her B.Mus. in Music Composition from Seoul National University. In addition to her scholarship, she is a performer of traditional Korean music, specializing in the geomungo, a six-stringed zither. Before joining Harvard, she taught courses on World Music and East Asian Performing Arts at Boston University, Brandeis University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.