About
Jenniferlove Kim was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, about forty minutes southwest of the city. She earned a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD in Sociology from Temple University. Her academic research and writing focus on the potential and power of individual human agency using ethnographic methods of participant observation and the life story interview. Her dissertation, “The Merits of a Fool,” analyzed five decades of transformative American sketch comedy that challenged racism in the post-Civil Rights era. Her article, “Racism’s Back Door,” published in 2020 in the Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, takes a theoretical deep dive into the philosophical concept of Geist, or consciousness, about how comedy is a particular kind of cultural engagement that can alter the processes of human consciousness. She has also co-authored an academic article on the identity formation of 2nd generation migrants and a chapter on the theory of culture for the Cambridge Handbook of Sociology.
Forthcoming in 2026, she is co-authoring the 3rd Edition of Pop Culture Freaks in the chapter on Race and Popular Culture. In addition to her academic work, Kim is a published poet.
After graduating from Temple in May 2015, she left the East Coast for Portland, OR after several disappointing academic interviews. She struggled in Portland, working several jobs simultaneously and working to revise her dissertation into a book for a general audience. In 2018, she moved to San Diego and found inspiration to continue her research on comedy with a new ethnographic approach at The Comedy Store in La Jolla, CA. This research, the 26 life story interviews of local comedians she collected, and her journey to that point form the foundation of her current book project, The Rebellious. While in San Diego, she accepted an Assistant Teaching Professor position in the Sociology Department at Siena College for the 2019-2020 academic year. She returned to San Diego from 2020-2023 and worked as a server and as a Lecturer II at University of San Diego in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Since 2023, she is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Sociology at Northern Arizona University and teaches courses in writing, popular culture, and statistics.
She loves being in nature, in solitude, and is the happiest when she can enjoy uninterrupted, autonomous time. She has an obsessive craving for gourmet cheese and loves, in general, everything about food culture: cooking, restaurants and dining out, and wine and libations. While estranged from her family of origin, she treasures the history of her family’s migration from South Korea and the sacrifices both sides of her family made to leave North Korea during the Korean War. Soon, she hopes to meet her soulmate and to discover and build security and love in a family of her own.
