Bo kyung Blenda Im is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in popular music and Christianity in Korea and the Korean Diaspora. In her research and teaching, she critiques neo-Orientalist constructions of “Asia” and engages questions that pertain to race and racialization, modernity and coloniality, temporality and aesthetics, and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Her interdisciplinary work primarily addresses music studies and dialogues with religious studies, area studies, ethnic studies, and anthropology.
After earning a BA in Music History and Communication Studies (double major) from the University of California, Los Angeles, Im matriculated in the MAR in Religion and Music program at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. She then earned her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to returning to Yale in fall 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Sacred Music and of Divinity (joint appointment), she worked at the Korea Institute, Harvard University, as the Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellow (2021-23).
Im’s current book project Transpacific Modernity and the Forgotten Constant: Race, Music, and Faith in Seoul reconceives transpacific musical modernity through a restorative chrono political framework. This ethnographic project attends to the co-production of religious and racial subjectivity in Korean Christians’ engagements with Black gospel and contemporary worship music, and forwards an epistemic intervention that re-establishes radical contemporaneity between Asia and the West.