Sang Jung Kim 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR,

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA 

Email: sangjung-kim [at] uiowa.edu 

My name is Sang Jung Kim (Sang). I am an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. I study the interaction between technology, politics, and social identity, with particular attention to the mediating role of social media platforms and the spread of information to the public. I explore the identities of message creators and message receivers on social media platforms—including racial identity, gender identity, and political identity—and utilize both experimental methods and computational approaches to understand how consumers and creators of such content introduce and are impacted by biases.

My research has been recognized with top paper awards at major communication conferences, including the International Communication Association (ICA), the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and the National Communication Association (NCA). I received an Excellence in Teaching Award in recognition of my teaching contributions at UW-Madison. 

My work has been published in flagship journals, including the New Media and Society, Journal of Communication, Communication Methods & Measures, Political Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, Information, Communication, and Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Computational Communication Research, among other peer-reviewed journals.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

 1. Persuasive effects of multi-modal messages

2. Framing effects 

3. Interaction between technology, politics, and social identities

METHODOLOGICAL INTERESTS

1. Computer vision

2. Multi-modal classification of emotion 

with computational techniques

3. Computational social science

4. Experimental design

ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP

1. Executive board of Media and Democracy Data Cooperative (2021-present). 

1. Leader of the election debate & election fraud team at the Social Media and Democracy group (2021- 2022). 

2. Leader in investigating the effects of visual warning labels in the Computational Approaches and Message Effects Research group (2020 - 2021). 

3. A Leading member in examining cognitive media effects in the Cognitive Effects Research group (2018 - 2023). 

EDUCATION


2017 - 2023

Ph.D. in Journalism and Mass Communication. The University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Advisor: Douglas McLeod

Dissertation Committee: Dhavan Shah, Hernando Rojas, Zhongdang Pan, Markus Brauer

Dissertation: Partisan citizens, partisan media, and political sectarianism: Understanding the partisan divide in the United States.


2015 - 2017

M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication. Yonsei University.


2012 - 2015

B.A. in Communication. Political Science and Diplomacy. Yonsei University. [Double-Major]