Julia Jeonghyun Parke

Julia Jeonghyun Parke is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information’s University of Toronto, a Strategic Communications Advisor at Statistics Canada, and the incoming New Media and Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Jackman humanities Institute. Her research traces how virtual influencers—AI- and CGI-generated humanlike characters—reconfigure race, gender, intimacy, and power. Drawing from studies of social media platforms, digital labour, affect theory, and transpacific studies, she advances the concept of “virtual skin,” linking the technical calibration and rendering of skin in immersive and augmented spaces to historical patterns of racial representation. She analyzes commodified virtual skin, identity performance, and emergent racialization in social media ecosystems.

Parke also theorizes Hallyu, diasporic media, K‑POP, Internet culture, and girlhood. Her writing appears in New Media & Society, Feminist Theory, Canadian Journal of Communication, Journal of Global Diaspora & Migration, and The Conversation.

As part of her public initiatives, Parke hosts and produces the podcast LOVE+MACHINES, a series of expert interviews about AI and personal relationships, for the Creative Labour and Critical Futures research cluster. Her previous curations include REPLY 2000: Family, Diaspora, Suicide & KPOP, the flagship Asian Heritage Month programme with STACKT Market in 2024, supported by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.

Parke holds an MSc from the University of Oxford and a BA from the University of British Columbia. Her research is funded by SSHRC (CGS‑D), the Canadian Heritage‑SSHRC Digital Citizen Initiative, and the Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement.