Pil Ho Kim is a cultural sociologist whose teaching and research cover a wide range of topics related to Korea, from popular music and cinema to literature, urban culture, and social polarization. His first scholarly monograph, Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024), takes an unflinching look at Gangnam, the epicenter of Hallyu (the Korean Wave). The Gangnam portrayed in this book is the site of rampant disaster capitalism and rising inequality as well as the engine of cultural and technological innovation. The Polarizing Dreams book tour, generously supported by the Academy of Korean Studies and other sponsors, spanned 12 institutions of higher education in the U.S., Korea, and Germany from fall 2024 to summer 2025.

Kim’s primary area of research is popular music. He published research articles on Korea’s protest songs, underground hip-hop, and psychedelic rock. In collaboration with Dr. Wonseok Lee, he has contributed a book chapter on the history of K-pop to Contemporary Korean Culture from the Edge (Bloomsbury, 2026) and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled K-pop: The Global Soundwave from Asia for the Key Issues in Asian Studies book series. Kim’s second monograph project also involves music as he investigates the trans-Pacific cultural impact of Black freedom movements on modern Korean history: Abolitionist literature in Colonial Korea, Civil Rights songs circulated among South Korean democracy activists, K-pop fandom’s support for Black Lives Matter, and other notable cases over the course of more than a century. He received support for this project as a member of OSU’s Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows in 2023-4. 

 In the field of film studies, Kim’s research cuts across the militarized border between North and South Korea as evidenced by his solo and co-authored essays in The Bloomsbury Handbook of North Korean Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2025), Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, and Acta Koreana. With his academic training in political sociology, Kim co-editedThe South Korean Development Experience: Beyond Aid (Palgrave McMillan, 2014) and produced research on the East Asian political economy. He continues to be actively involved in social scientific research.

At Ohio State, Kim teaches general education courses on Korean literature and culture, as well as specialized courses for Korean studies majors, minors, and graduate students. The topics for the specialized courses include Korean cinema, K-pop, urban development of Seoul, literary and media translation, and protest culture. Most of these courses have been offered to other universities in the Big Ten Academic Alliance through the Korea Foundation e-School Program. He has supervised five master’s theses from OSU’s Interdisciplinary East Asian MA Program and continues to advise MA and Ph.D. students.  

Kim has served or is serving on the executive boards of multiple academic organizations, such as Korean Literature Association, Committee on Korean Studies, and Korean LLC at Modern Language Association. He is a co-editor of the book series, DITTA: Korean Humanities in Translation, published by Rutgers University Press.