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Mindy Fullilove on The Tao of K-Drama

Mindy Fullilove ’71 at Bryn Mawr College: the 2023 Mary Flexner Lectureship

Dr. '71, professor of urban policy and health at the New School and a board-certified psychiatrist, will hold the Mary Flexner Lectureship at Bryn Mawr in fall 2023. She is the first alumna of the College to hold the lectureship. 

Fullilove's work focuses on the power of place in psychology. Since the 1990s she has studied the collective trauma of displacement, and collective practices of resilience and healing, with a focus on poor and minority neighborhoods across the United States.

During her fall residency at Bryn Mawr, Fullilove will share her current work, which emerges from her encounters with Korean drama (K-drama), which she argues sheds distinctive light on the trauma of displacement and collective modes of healing. Subsidized by the South Korean government, K-drama is part of a modern wave of Korean popular cultural production that has become a global phenomenon. K-dramas, she argues, help international audiences learn how Korean communities have grappled with local and national upheaval, while expanding our understanding of collective trauma and healing more generally.

Fullilove will give a series of three public lectures under the rubric “The Tao of K-Drama,” the first public presentation of new work slated to be published by Harvard University Press. The lectures will be supplemented with associated public talks and symposia. The entire TriCo community is cordially invited to all lectures and affiliated events. Fullilove will also visit seven undergraduate courses that incorporate her work and are being offered in conjunction with the Flexner lecture series.

Fullilove's Flexner Lectures and community engagement activities will lead to the completion of a book tentatively titled The Tao of K-Drama: Perspectives on Moving from Displacement to Empowered Collaboration.