I am a THATCamp newbie! I am very excited to be attending and look forward to meeting all of you.

Right now, my pride is KPK: Kpop Kollective, my digital cultural studies project on Korean popular culture.  I, along with a rag-tag band of colleagues and students at my institution and across the country, engage in collaborative research and writing, studying and document the international fan’s experience of Korean popular culture, which occurs almost exclusively on the Internet.  I am running three IRB-approved studies through the site, and  I am interested in talking to others about how to successfully collaborate in a digital environment in terms of writing, teaching research methods and writing in an onine environment.  I am also interested in innovative ways of presenting large amounts of information in a way that engages the user. (We want to create an interactive cultural history of post-1997 Korean popular culture).

I’ve also been charged by my colleagues at Elon University to find out more about how we can plant that digital humanities flag at my institution in ways that are recognized by administration as legitimate scholarly activity.

I’m an associate professor in an English department at Elon University, but I have an interdisciplinary degree (American studies), and my work tends to be transnational. I do comparative cultural studies (African American, Asian, Asian American), focusing on visual culture, popular culture and literature.  I have a book under contract on Afro-Asian cultural interaction in a global age, and working on a second combining qualitative research and cultural analysis on Korean and Chinese historical television dramas. I teach courses in American studies, American literature, Asian film and literature and speculative fiction.

Can’t wait to meet all of you!