Bio

Dr. Min Ji Kang is a scholar and teacher of women’s and gender studies, comparative ethnic studies, and contemporary literature and culture. Her research examines how literature, museums, popular music, and digital media represent gendered violence, racialized histories, cultural memory, and resistance.

Her research project, Shared Narratives of Defiance, places representations of Korean “comfort women” and African American enslaved women into comparative conversation. Through analyses of literature and memorial museums, the project explores how women survive, resist, and challenge systems of racial, sexual, and imperial violence. Her related scholarship examines Asian American and African American literature, public memory, postcolonial feminism, and the representation of historically marginalized women.

Dr. Kang’s current research also focuses on gender, race, and technology in popular culture. She is the editor of The K-pop Reader: Gender and Technology in Korean Pop Music, under contract with Routledge. The collection investigates how technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual performance, social media, and digital production shape gender, identity, labor, and fandom within K-pop. Her other scholarship and presentations address Afro-Asian connections in K-pop and hip-hop, feminist utopias, adaptation, racial politics in popular media, and the intersections of Asian American and African American cultural production. Her article about teaching K-pop through remix in the classroom was recently featured in the peer reviewed online journal Adaptation Today.

Her scholarship has been presented at the Modern Language Association (MLA), National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), and Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS). In 2025, she received the President’s Contingent Faculty Award from MELUS and organized and presided over a comparative “comfort women” panel at the 2026 MLA Convention.

Dr. Kang encourages students to connect gender and critical race theories with literature, popular culture, media, and their everyday experiences. She has developed courses on K-pop, hip-hop, and R&B; gender, race, and body politics; Asian American identities; transgender and genderqueer studies; environmental justice; war and political violence; and (dis)ability studies. Her teaching emphasizes interdisciplinary inquiry, thoughtful discussion, and helping students recognize how culture can both reinforce and challenge structures of power.

Education

Ph.D. University of Florida

M.A. University of Florida

B.A. University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies, University of Florida

Specializations

Transnational gender studies; Asian American and African American literature; comparative ethnic studies; popular culture; K-pop and hip-hop studies; digital media and technology; public memory and museum studies; postcolonial studies; adaptation studies.