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Matthew Jungsuk Howard, PhD

Assistant Professor

Faculty Advisor for Lambda Pi Eta

Dr. Matthew Jungsuk Howard is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication. As an Asian/Americanist Media Historian, he is interested in the ways we can reckon with mass media phenomena over longer periods of time and broader geographical entanglements, as well as the ways that such entanglements shape and are shaped by the lives of ordinary people. A keen scholar of empire in the age of social media, video games, and other "new" media, Dr. Howard likes to ask what happens when we slow down and deconstruct the power relations embedded in the ways we have fun. Drawing upon his own lived experiences, his dissertation, Rendering Hallyu: Gyopo Media Histories of the Korean Wave, examines the globalized popularity of South Korean pop culture in screen cultures, music, and esports through diasporic ways of knowing, living, and being minoritized.

Refereed Publications

Bascuñan-Wiley, N. and Howard, M. J. (2024). Illegible Multiculturalisms: Making, Digesting, and Translating Empanadas and Doenjang-jjigae within Digital Monolingualism. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 27(1). https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/5433/.
Voorhees, G. and Howard, M. J. (2024). High-Tech Orientalism in Play: Performing South Koreanness in Esports. In C. B. Patterson and T. Fickle (Eds.) Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (p. 190-205). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Howard, M. J. (2022). Highway to the Golden Zone(fire): PC Bangs and Techno-Orientalism in the StarCraft II Visual Novel. Journal of Games Criticism 5(Bonus Issue A). https://gamescriticism.org/2023/07/26/highway-to-the-golden-zonefire-pc-bangs-and-techno-orientalism-in-the-startcraft-ii-visual-novel/.