Interests

Entomology

Insects are the most diverse group of animals on Earth, comprising more than half of all known organisms. Growing up in Changwon, South Korea, an industrial city interspersed with mountains, I often encountered insects that had traveled from the mountains into the urban areas and fell in love with them. In addition to rearing stag beetles and rhinoceros beetles, I collected longhorn beetles—fuzzy, stridulating Moechotypa diphysis, and Rhagium inquisitor larvae and adults I would find by peeling off pine bark—as well as dragonflies, like the pepper-red Crocothemis servilia.

After a sojourn in linguistics and several years of working, I returned to full-time studies for entomology at Penn State. I am still a beginner and am clarifying my direction in entomology. However, I do know that I am interested in systematics—how insects are evolutionarily related to each other—and the history of entomology. For my master's, I am working on a checklist of the fireflies of Pennsylvania, with plans to create a species distribution model of select species. On the side, I am currently working on an article on the origin of double mounts, a technique used to pin very small insects, and the preservation of historical double mounts.

Publications

Kim, Seung-hwan Leo. 2026. "Pennsylvania Leatherwing". Bug of the Month, Penn State Center for Pollinator Research.

Linguistics and Korean Studies

South Koreans invest staggering amounts of time, money, and effort into learning English because they see it as crucial for upward mobility and status reproduction. A grueling education system feeds six billion dollars per year to the English education industry alone, most of it going to after-school cram schools (hagwon). Speaking English "like a native" has special significance: it indicates that the speaker has become adapted to the globalized world through exceptional striving. We can detect a synthesis of Western social Darwinism with Eastern Confucian meritocracy at play here.

I studied linguistics at Boston College with the goal to understand how the English language came to possess so many South Koreans into extreme actions in its pursuit, such as "early study abroad" (jogi yuhak), which often involves the mother and child moving abroad while the father stays in South Korea, and pediatric surgery to cut the frenulum under the tongue in a misguided belief that it would improve pronunciation of the English "R". Currently, I am interested in how 19th century Koreans, faced with encroaching imperial powers and sorely lacking means to defend their country, came to see themselves and other nations, races, and ethnicities in the globalizing world, and how modern South Koreans are affected by this history.

Publications

Kim, Seung-hwan Leo. 2025. “Joseph Sung-Yul PARK: In Pursuit of English: Language and Subjectivity in Neoliberal South Korea”. Asian Studies 13 (suppl.): 371–74. https://doi.org/10.4312/as.2025.13.sup.371-374.