Jee-Eun Regina Song

Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Korean Studies
Ph.D., University of California, Davis

E-mail:
jrsong@berkeley.edu

Research Interests:
Gender and cultural politics, material culture, transnational history, American ethnic literature, and critical theory.

Biography: Jee-Eun Song is a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral scholar in the Center for Korean Studies. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic field research, her current book manuscript, "Building an Empire One Cup at a Time: Cultural Meaning and Power of Starbucks Korea," explores transnational consumption practices through the sites of competing discourses between nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and gender in South Korea. As the first comprehensive ethnography of coffee consumers and baristas in Seoul, her project challenges the ways in which the commodification of brand-name coffee in South Korea both addresses and overlooks the political, economic, and social restructuring associated with neoliberal globalization in contemporary South Korea.