Associate Professor Sean Kim is in the area of Tourism at the School of Business and Law.
Key research areas
- Film tourism
- Tourism and popular culture
- Tourism and creative industries
- Food and tourism; food tourism
- Representation, identify and tourism
- Tourism impacts and communities
- Tourism in Asia
- Tourist behaviour and psychology
Biography
Dr Kim is Associate Professor of Tourism and Creative Industries and Deputy Head of SBL Centre for Tourism Research. He is listed as the top 2% of the world’s most cited scientists in the field of “Sport, Leisure & Tourism” by Stanford University, for five consecutive years since 2020. He is Associate Editor of Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research (JHTR).
His main research areas are twofold. The first focuses on the close relationships between tourism and popular culture, with particular attention to tourism and (popular) media, media representation, celebrity cultures, and fan pilgrimage. Specifically, he is an internationally recognised scholar in the field of film tourism and its broader impacts and implications. The second theme is centred on the relationship between (in)tangible heritage (e.g., food and foodways), identity and tourism with particular attention to global food tourism phenomenon. His work is international and interdisciplinary at the boundaries of social psychology, cultural studies, media studies, geography, and tourism management and marketing.
He has published more than 100 scholarly and industrial publications. In addition, Associate Professor Kim has co-edited ‘2075 – The Future(s) of Food Tourism (2025)’, ‘Handbook on Food Tourism (2024)’, ‘Food Tourism in Asia (2019)’, and ‘Film tourism in Asia: Evolution, transformation and trajectory (2018)'.
Furthermore, he is regularly appointed as an expert advisory panel member and external assessor for prestigious funding bodies such as European Research Council (ERC) and Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Humanities and Social Sciences division. Associate Professor Kim was a visiting professor at Hiroshima University in Japan and at School of History, Culture and Communication in Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
