The University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication is excited to announce that Sang Jung Kim will be joining as an assistant professor of strategic communication in fall 2023.  

Kim is currently a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation, “The consequences of partisan prejudice,” examines the underlying mechanism of why individuals are reluctant to have conversations with opposing partisans and how news plays a role in strengthening partisan prejudice. 

Kim’s research has primarily focused on (1) how the public engages with emotions embedded in messages as frames and (2) how different message modalities interact with the framing effects. She employs experiments and computational methods in exploring the affective and multi-modal dynamics in the media ecology across contexts such as politics, science, health, and marketing.  

Kim earned her Master of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication at Yonsei University. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Political Science and Diplomacy at Yonsei University. 

She has authored or co-authored 12 peer-reviewed academic journal articles, in a variety of top journals, including New Media and Society, Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Computational Communication Research. Her honors include top paper awards at the International Communication Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the National Communication Association, and the Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Kim is fascinated by ever-diversifying forms of journalism, from text and image to audio, and believes in the power of journalism to enlighten citizens. As a researcher examining the persuasive effects of different message modalities, Kim is excited to join the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa and to become a part of the pre-eminent multimedia storytelling school. At the University of Iowa, she plans to design and evaluate persuasive multimedia messages promoting science and mitigating political polarization in the digital environment.  

She’s going to teach strategic communication classes with a focus on digital analytics and social media marketing. She’ll teach graduate courses in computational approaches to research. At Wisconsin, she taught “Communication and Public Opinion,” “Media and the Consumer, and “Introduction to Mass Communication.” 

Kim is eager to collaborate and grow at the University of Iowa. “I am excited to exchange research ideas with faculty and students at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication and move forward together,” said Kim.