Dr. Bo kyung Blenda Im was the Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Korea Institute for academic years 2021-22 and 2022-23.
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. As the Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellow, Blenda worked on her book project, Transpacific Belonging: Race, Music, and Faith in Seoul, which reconceived 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.
Prior to joining the Korea Institute as a Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellow, Blenda worked at Yale University, where she held appointments as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Institute of Sacred Music (2020-21) and as a Lecturer in Ethnomusicology (2020), and taught courses hosted by the Council on East Asian Studies, the Divinity School, and the Music Department. She received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Pennsylvania (2019). Blenda’s research has been supported through various grants and fellowships, such as the Fulbright U.S. Student (IIE) Research Award and the Y. H. Park Fellowship in Korean Studies at Penn. Her work has been recognized with prizes from the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Association for Korean Music Research, and the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music. Blenda is currently Assistant Professor of Sacred Music at Yale University.
The Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellowship is generously supported by the Jeffrey D. and Jean K. Lee Fund at the Korea Institute.