Research

I am a feminist cultural studies scholar interested in popular genres as sites where commonsense ideas about gender, youth, and modernity take shape. Thus far, my research has focussed on East Asian popular culture, where I have been interested in historical continuities and transformations of local gender ideals, as well as of transnational continuities and discontinuities across shared generic tropes as mediated by changing media technologies. I am currently revising my PhD thesis (2023, University of Sydney) on the campus romance film for publication as a monograph.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:

Nara, Vivien. 2024. “Gentlemen Rappers: Masculinity and Traditional Style in Korean Popular Music Performance.” Media, Culture & Society, 46 (7): 1344-1357.
https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241241978.

Nara, Vivien. 2024. “Romance in the Recent Past: A Common Temporality of Love in Our Beloved Summer (Korea, 2021) and First Love (Japan, 2022).” Global Storytelling 4 (2), special issue edited by Dal Yong Jin and Ying Zhu.
https://doi.org/10.3998/gs.6414.

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters:

Nara, Vivien. In progress. “I Like You, but Please Study: The Xueba as a Public Figure of the Massification of Education in China.” In Teens on Screens in the 21st Century, edited by Timothy Shary and Elissa Nelson, University of Texas Press.

Nara, Vivien. In progress. “Representations of Mental Illness and Neurodivergence in the contemporary K-Drama Romance: It’s Okay Not to Not Be Okay (2020), Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022), and Daily Dose of Sunshine (2023).” In Diversity in Korean Screen Cultures, edited by Yonson Ahn and Dal Yong Jin, Routledge.

For Full CV, please email me.