About the Team

Hannah Hyun Kyong Chang is Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield. Now a cultural historian and a musicologist, her formative years were influenced by Seo Taiji and Boys, Nirvana, and Chopin in equal parts. Her modules include ‘History of Korean Popular Music’, which traces the development of Korean popular music. This module starts with songs on gramophone records made during the Japanese colonial period and ends with BTS’s meteoric rise in contemporary global media. In this module, she enjoys thinking with her students about the relationship between popular music and Korean historical experiences, including experiences of colonialism, war, authoritarianism, and globalisation. She also enjoys learning new things about K-pop from her students. Her research and teaching interests extend beyond Korean popular music. Many of her publications are on early-twentieth-century transnational musical cultures that involved multifaceted interactions among various Korean actors, American missionaries, and Japanese colonial intellectuals.

Gemma Ballard is a Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Whilst her research largely focuses on cinema (in particular, cinematic landscapes and representations of national identity in South Korean film), her interests extend to the wider sphere of Korean popular culture, including television, music and literature. These areas are integrated and explored further within her teaching practice, where she often asks students to consider how such globally-facing texts are used to construct and/or exhibit a specific kind of ‘Koreanness’. 

Outside of her research and teaching, KPOP continues to have a significant influence on Gemma’s personal music taste. During her formative years as a teenager, she was a huge fan of BIGBANG and EXO.

Youn-hi Hughes is the East Asian Studies librarian at the University of Sheffield. She joined the library in 2004, and Youn-hi is now working in the library’s Faculty Engagement Team to support academics and students with their teaching and research. The first project she implemented, with funding from the Korea Foundation, was adding Korean script to the Korean collection, to make it searchable in Korean. Her most recent project was installing the Window on Korea in the University Sheffield Library in 2023. This project involved close collaboration with Korean studies academics and students, which she enjoyed. The library received 3,000 Korean-related materials, including many K-pop CDs and DVDs, which are really popular with students and academics. Youn-hi is the current chair of the Korea Library Group in the UK, the secretary of the European Network of Korean Resources Specialists, and the library liaison to the Council of the British Association for Korean Studies.

Emily is a 3rd year Korean Studies student currently completing her Year abroad at Hanyang University in South Korea. Emily has been interested in K-pop since 2021 when she first listened to BTS's song Dynamite and she is now a fan of many different K-pop groups including Seventeen, Stray Kids and Ateez. She also spends a lot of her free time watching Korean TV dramas which is what led her to study the Korean language. Emily became involved in this project after taking Dr Chang's module ‘History of Korean Popular Music’. Upon hearing about the exhibit during a lecture, she immediately expressed interest in being involved and has since been a key part of the team.  

In the exhibit, she has mostly been focused on K-pop fandoms and their impact (emotional, artistic, financial). As a "fan artist" herself, several of her original works have been featured in the exhibition.

Mia is a PhD candidate at the School of East Asian Studies, at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on popular culture, identity politics, and civic engagement in non-democratic regimes. Being a K-pop fan for more than 15 years, Mia is currently writing a thesis on how transnational K-pop fandom in China can serve as a form of youth politics to negotiate with popular nationalism and patriarchy. 

Titled ‘Transnational K-pop fandom in China: nationalism, activism, and Identities’, chapters of the thesis have been presented at different international conferences. Conducting ethnographic research on fandom that is often stigmatised and pathologised, Mia was impressed by the creativity, engagement, and agency of fans, and found her enthusiasm in listening to and bringing up the voice of fans to academic works.

Mark is a third-year student of East Asian Studies and is currently studying as an international student at Seoul National University in South Korea. Mark was first introduced to K-pop in 2013, with the global hit ‘Gangnam Style’ by PSY, but it was later, in 2017, with the theme song for the anime Blue Exorcist, ‘Take Off’ by the group 2pm, that K-pop became one of his main interests. He mainly listens to older 2nd generation K-pop groups, but his favourite groups include NCT, f(x), and aespa. Mark became involved with this exhibition after taking Dr. Chang’s module on the ‘History of Korean Popular Music’. His wide-ranging knowledge of K-pop and his general interest in gender identities in East Asia was a natural fit for working alongside Dr. Chang to create a section for the exhibition on gender in K-pop. Here, Mark explores how gender is expressed in K-pop, not only by the artists themselves but also by their fans, who often attempt to recreate and play imaginatively with the gender identities of their favourite artists or idols.