Behind K-pop’s Global Popularity

The Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs’ East Asia Program presents Jung-Min Mina Lee.  This lecture examines the complex and dynamic factors that have contributed to K-pop’s global popularity at various stages of its creative process. On the production and dissemination level, the K-pop industry is known to make intentional efforts for globalization, rendering its products internationally palatable through musical and visual representations and maximizing opportunities for digital circulation. Furthermore, its fandom has taken growing importance in recent years. K-pop fans are performative and social, forging their own identities and communities in global online spaces, which fuels K-pop with greater loyalty and a sense of ownership. 

Jung-Min “Mina” Lee is a visiting scholar and lecturer at Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, where she earned a PhD in musicology from the Music Department. She specializes in the analytical and historical interpretation of twentieth-century music, especially post-World War II Korean music, as well as Korean popular music (K-pop), propaganda and protest songs in Korea, and music and artificial intelligence. Her recent publications include a peer-reviewed article in Music and Politics (2020) and chapters in Cambridge Companion to K-pop (ed. Suk-Young Kim, forthcoming, 2023), Music and the Third Wave of Democratisation (special-themed journal issue of Twentieth-Century Music, forthcoming), and Digital Revolution and Music (published in Korean, Monopoly, 2021). She has also written extensively for public audiences, mainly in the form of program notes for several orchestras and ensembles, including the first US concert dedicated to the Korean-German composer Younghi Pagh-Paan.