The JHI is pleased to announce our 2026-27 New Media and Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow—Julia Jeonghyun Parke. She will join us in July 2026 for our theme year Doubles, Doppelgangers.
Julia Jeonghyun Parke is a PhD candidate (completion by June 2026) in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Her research intersects critical digital humanities, affect theory, and Asian North American studies, focusing on the "virtual skin" of AI-generated influencers. A Strategic Communications Advisor and AI bias educator for Statistics Canada, Julia hosts the podcast Love+Machines (with support from the Creative Labour and Critical Futures research cluster) and curated REPLY 2000: Family, Diaspora, Suicide & KPOP, a public exhibition on diasporic history. She also runs Asian Thought Club (@asianthoughtclub), a reading community funded by the School of Cities that brings Asian diasporic discourse to urban spaces around Toronto. Her writing appears in New Media & Society, Feminist Theory, Canadian Journal of Communication, and The Conversation. She holds an MSc from the University of Oxford and a BA from UBC.
Fellowship Project: Synthetic Intimacies
Synthetic Intimacies examines how AI companions and virtual influencers reshape human intimacy and identity. Through a second season of the podcast Love+Machines, longform journalism, and a trade book proposal, Parke brings humanities research on digital doubles into public conversation. The project analyzes how tech companies commodify loneliness through AI companions like Replika, and how virtual influencers like Lil Miquela deploy racial signifiers while competing with human creators. Drawing on affect theory and critical race studies, Parke explores how these synthetic relationships promise connection while foreclosing genuine reciprocity. This public humanities work translates academic insights about platform capitalism's extraction of intimacy for general audiences navigating these technologies daily.
About this Fellowship
The New Media and Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship is intended to foster knowledge exchange between the academy and the public. It is a component of the Jackman Humanities Institute’s research commitment to public scholarship, discussion, debate, and examination across multiple media platforms.