Ha will examine how economic and political responses alter according to the types of financial crises -- currency crisis, banking crisis, and sovereign debt crisis -- encountered and how domestic political institutions influence government responses to these crises. She argues that fiscal and monetary policies tend to be more severely tightened under a currency crisis than under other crises, and the intensity of political atmosphere such as elections and electoral competitions pressures the governments to moderate the fiscal policies and even to adopt expansionary policies.

Ha is an assistant professor in the department of politics and policy in the School of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Her research areas include comparative politics, political economy, and political institutions. Her work has dealt primarily with the impact of globalization and domestic political institutions on domestic political economy, particularly as manifested in inequality, poverty, growth, unemployment, inflation, welfare spending, and taxation.

Ha received a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. In her dissertation, Distributive Politics in the Era of Globalization, she explains how globalization and government ideology have shaped income distribution in terms of welfare, inequality, and poverty. She currently works on government policy responses to financial crises and their political and economic effects.

Space is limited and RSVPs will be accepted on a first come, first served basis.

Except for specialists working on the period, the Korean Empire's (1897–1910) project to develop Pyongyang as the "Western Capital" (Sŏgyŏng) is not all that well known even among Korea historians. From the perspective of international relations, there can be no doubt that the Russo-Japanese War sealed independent Korea’s fate. All the same, in the last two decades or so, Korea’s own effort toward modernization has received more attention among historians who no longer dismiss the history of the Korean Empire as the tail end of the Chosŏn Dynasty. For sure, the official rhetoric that empires old and new have had two capitals conceals imperial Korea’s self-perceptions about its place in the civilized world of the past, the present, and the future. Moreover, scrutiny of the circumstances in which the government undertook the project before it came to a halt allows insight into the Korean Empire’s understanding of geopolitical realities at the time.

Eugene Y. Park is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor in History in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the director of Penn's Korean Studies Program. Dr. Park completed his doctorate in East Asian languages and civilizations at Harvard in 1999 and has received numerous research grants and fellowships, including: a 2007–08 Seoul National University Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies Fellowship; a 2003–04 Korea Foundation Advanced Research Grant; a 1999–2000 Yale University Council on East Asian Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship; a 1996–97 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship; and a 1995–96 Fulbright Fellowship. His research interests focus on the sociopolitical history of early modern Korea, and his current work examines the chungin ("middle people") to address questions of modernity, identities, and agency. His book, Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination in Late Chosŏn Korea, 1600–1894, was published by the Harvard University Asia Center in 2007. He has published chapters and articles in venues such as Journal of Social History and Yŏksa wa hyŏnsil.

Northeast Asian countries share a tumultuous history from the last century. But South Korea stands alone in that it has launched a comprehensive national investigation to take a more balanced look at its tortuous modern history and finally give voice to the many thousands of people who perished in state-sponsored political killings but whose stories have long been silenced.

In the past several years, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has led an effort to dig into this grim hidden history. It has confirmed dozens of mass political killings during the Korean War—summary executions of leftists and supposed sympathizers, including women and children, who were shot and dumped into makeshift trenches, mine shafts or the sea. Grave by mass grave, investigators and victims' families have unearthed the skeletons and buried truths. No longer shackled by the repression of free speech, victims of the Communist witch-hunts by the post-war military governments in Seoul also began speaking out. The Commission investigated their cases and concluded that state interrogators used torture to extract false confessions from the victims. Its findings led courts to reopen the cases, reverse the old convictions and clear the victims' names, sometimes posthumously. But the Commission's work has also reawakened the painful memories and stoked political controversy in South Korea. It exposed the deep-running ideological divide, reminding South Koreans of the long shadow the Korean War still casts over their society.

Mr. Sang-Hun Choe, whose Pulitzer-winning journalism identified and helped spur the desire of South Koreans to revisit their recent history, has written extensively about the Commission's investigations.