Associate Professor Jo Elfving-Hwang is the Director of the Korea Research Centre of Western Australia and Dean Global, Korea, at the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor Global. She is also Associate Professor of Korean Society and Culture at the School of Media Creative Arts and Social inquiry at Curtin University.  Her research focuses on the body in Korean culture and society, and she leads the Centre’s thematic initiative focusing on “Bodies”. Her previous work has examined how beauty work and cosmetic surgery in Korea relate to embodied and material expressions of performing social class and status, race and celebrity beauty work as a form of somatic entrepreneurship. Recently Jo’s work has examined social meanings attached to beauty work as the body ages and how middle aged men relate to technologies of the body in every day corporate contexts. Her monograph drawing on the findings of project is titled Beauty Matters: the Body in Korean Culture and Society.

Prior to joining Curtin University in 2022, Jo worked at the University of Western Australia where she lead the development of UWA's Korean Studies program. She has also worked as the Director of Korean Studies at Frankfurt University in Germany, having worked in a number of academic roles in the UK. She currently serves in the Education Advisory Board of the Australia Korea Business Council and is the Vice President of the Korean Studies Association of Australasia. In 2022 she was nominated by the Australia Korea Foundation as one of the 60 people in Australia who have made a significant contribution to Australia-Korea relations in the past 60 years. 

Prof Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist and ethnographer of internet cultures, focusing especially on influencer cultures, internet celebrity, and social media pop cultures, mostly in the Asia Pacific region, including Korea. She works as Professor of Internet Studies and ARC DECRA Fellow, Deputy Director of the Korea Research Centre, Founding Director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab, and Founder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network, among other portfolios. She has published six books and over 80 articles and chapters, and her research has directly informed policy changes at government and industry level. She has won international accolades, including WA Young Tall Poppy Science Award (2022), The Australian Top 40 Early Career Researchers (2021), ABC TOP 5 Humanities Fellow (2020), ICA Pop Comm Early Career Scholar Prize (2020), Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia (2018), and Pacific Standard 30 Top Thinkers Under 30 (2016). 

She is currently working on a book titled 'Social Media Pop Cultures in Korea'. Reach her at wishcrys.com.

Dr. Alica Kizeková works as a Lecturer of international relations, security and strategic studies at the Faculty of Humanities, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. She collaborates as a Senior Research Fellow with the Slovak Foreign Policy Association (SFPA). Her current research focuses on South Korea’s Indo-Pacific strategy and responses to minilateral initiatives (AUKUS, the Quad, etc.). In her previous work, she researched the EU-South Korean cooperation,  South Korea-EU democratic promotion and global governance and The Czech Republic-South Korea relations. She also co-organised three conferences on South Korea-Central Europe relations and coordination of activities in the Indo-Pacific with the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Prague and the Faculty of International Relations of the Prague University of Economics and Business.

Prior to joining Curtin University in 2024, Alica worked as a Senior Researcher and the Head of the Asia-Pacific Unit at the Institute of International Relations (IIR) in Prague in the Czech Republic, where she coordinated activities related to engagements with South Korea and the Think Visegrad V4 Think-Tank Platform. In 2015-2017, she was an expert adviser and speechwriter on Asia and the EU to the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic and was a member of the official delegation at the 2nd Meeting of Speakers of Eurasian Countries’ Parliaments in Seoul in June 2017.

She also worked as the Head of the Department of Asian Studies and an academic at the Metropolitan University of Prague (2014-2015), a Visiting Fellow at RSIS at NTU in Singapore and a National Contact Point and a Ministerial Adviser for the Slovak Republic in the European Union communitary program – IDABC (Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public administrations, businesses and citizens). She pursued her PhD by research in International Relations at Bond University in Queensland in Australia where she lectured courses on international relations, diplomacy and geopolitics (2005-2023).  Her broader professional interests include regionalism, multilateralism, geopolitics, democratisation, soft balancing, great power relations, state strategies and security in Central Europe, Central Asia and the Indo-Pacific region.

Ms Younghye Seo Whitney joint Curtin as a Korea Foundation Associate Lecturer of Korean Studies in 2023 and is currently an Associate Lecturer of Korean Studies at MCASI, with the focus on developing the Korean language education side of the Korean Studies major at Curtin University.

Younghye has more than 20 years of Korean and Japanese language teaching experience. Most recently, Younghye has taught Korean at the Australian National University and the University of Western Australia. In 2022, Younghye developed the new WA ATAR Korean second language syllabus and materials for years 11 and 12. The WA Korean ATAR program is scheduled to commence this year (2023).

In addition to her teaching activities, Younghye is currently working on her PhD through the Australian National University. Her doctoral research project focuses on the role played by transnational intellectual networks in South Korea's pro-democracy movement during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Through a social network analysis approach to primary source materials, Younghye endeavours to rediscover an intricate network of actors that operated between Korea and Japan during this period.