HwaJung Kim is a postdoctoral research fellow at Seoul National University, Graduate School of International Studies, Institute of International Affairs, funded by the National Research Foundation. She is also a non-resident Secretary General of the Public Diplomacy Center, Ewha Womans University, and serves as a supervisor of the Korean-German Junior Forum, in collaboration with Free University of Berlin.
She obtained her Ph.D. from Ewha Womans University in 2016, receiving the best doctoral thesis prize from the university, where she has served as lecturer on public diplomacy at the Graduate School of International Studies. Before pursuing her doctoral degree, she had a journalism career at Ko-Am TV, affiliated with KBS World in Washington State and the U.S., and she worked as a freelance reporter at various cable channels and news magazines in Seoul. Having strong interests in cultural relations and public diplomacy, she joined the Public Diplomacy Division at the Australian Embassy in Seoul as a project coordinator and a cultural relations manager.
She has worked on public diplomacy-related research projects supported by the South Korean government and Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2014, 2015, 2018) and presented her research at various conferences such as the Salzburg Global Seminar (Salzburg, 2014), the International Conference on Politics (Athens, 2014), the Global Conference of Leadership (Barcelona, 2015) and the Symposium on Korea-Iran Cultural Relations (Seoul, 2017).
Her publications include co-authoring a book in Korean, Assessment Model on Public Diplomacy of South Korea (2016). Her research papers have been published in academic journals such as The Korean Journal of International Studies (August 2017) and The Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia (summer 2018). She also has contributed articles to the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (2011-2013). Her research focuses on public-private partnerships in public diplomacy, network governance of international cultural relations, and soft power sources.
