This lecture will examine the origins of the Cold War in East Asia, how early the Cold War came to Korea, how the Korean War transformed the containment doctrine, how it solidified the continuing divisions in East Asia, and how it transformed defense policy in the United States, leading to a far-flung structure of seemingly permanent military bases in South Korea, Japan, Germany, and many more countries that lasts down to 2010.  Professor Cumings will also examine problems of history and memory regarding what most Americans call "the forgotten war."

Bruce Cumings teaches international history, modern Korean history and East Asian political economy at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1987 and where he is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor and the chairman of the History Department.  He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975. He has taught at Swarthmore College (1975-77), the University of Washington (1977-86), and Northwestern University (1994-97). He is the author of the two-volume study, The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990), War and Television (Visal-Routledge, 1992), Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (W. W. Norton, 1997; updated ed. 2005), Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American—East Asian Relations (Duke University Press, 1999; paperback 2002), North Korea: Another Country (New Press, 2003), co-author of Inventing the Axis of Evil  (New Press, 2004), and is the editor of the modern volume of the Cambridge History of Korea (forthcoming). He is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Nation, Current History, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Le Monde Diplomatique. The first volume of his Origins won the John King Fairbank book award of the American Historical Association for the best book on East Asia in the previous two years, and the second volume won the Quincy Wright book award of the International Studies Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation-funded Foreign Area Fellows program, NEH, the MacArthur Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford, and the Abe Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council. He was also the principal historical consultant for the Thames Television/PBS 6-hour documentary, Korea: The Unknown War. He recently published Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power, which was ranked as one of the top 25 books of 2009 by the Atlantic Monthly. Random House will publish his short book, The Korean War, on the war’s 60th anniversary in 2010. He is also contracted to publish a new, single-volume synoptic edition of The Origins of the Korean War.

Professor Fujitani’s presentation will be drawn from his forthcoming book, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII. The book is a comparative and transnational study of ethnic and colonial soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War (or the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific) that focuses specifically on Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the United States army and Koreans who were recruited or drafted into the Japanese military. His research utilizes the two sites of soldiering as optics through which to examine the larger operations and structures of the changing U.S. and Japanese national empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations within the larger demands of conducting total war. He seeks to show how discussions about, policies, and representations of these two sets of soldiers tell us a great deal about the changing characteristics of wartime racism, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, gender politics, the family, and some other related issues on both sides of the Pacific that go well beyond the soldiers themselves, and whose repercussions remain with us today. The seminar will focus on the Korean Japanese side of his research.

Takashi Fujitani is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His primary areas of research are modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia-Pacific). His publications include: Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (UC Press, 1996; Japanese version, 1994; Korean translation, 2003);  Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (co-editor, Duke, 2001); and  Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII (forthcoming, UC Press; Japanese version, Iwanami Shoten); as well as numerous book chapters and articles published in Korean, Japanese and English. His recent research has been funded by the John. S. Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Social Science Research Council.

This seminar is supported by a generous grant from Koret Foundation.

As one of the core features of modern states, universal schooling provided a tool with which to disseminate the skills and knowledge demanded by the new era of industrialization and interstate competition, as well as to impart what it meant to be a citizen. Citizenship education, in fact, or "civics," lay at the heart of the education enterprise in the modern world, reflecting the new circumstances of competing nation-states and hence prioritizing the cultivation of the population’s identification with and allegiance to a particular nation and/or the state.  An education system, then, came to be regarded as a strategic necessity if not entirely an idealistic or humanitarian one. 

This presentation explores modern Korean state making through an examination of citizen education at the turn of the 20th century.  How did the larger purpose of universal schooling and citizenship education evolve as the Korean state underwent so many dramatic shifts in form, function, and even sovereignty?  What role did the educational institutions, from the state bureaucracy to the schools themselves, play in spreading the lessons of loyalty, allegiance, and identity?  And finally, How did Confucian ethics and statecraft affect the demands of the modern schooling system?  Indeed the legacies of pre-20th century Korea extended well into the colonial era (1910-45), including the period of wartime mobilization in the 1930s and 40s, when schooling became central to the intensified, radical assimilation policy of turning Koreans into "imperial subjects."

Professor Hwang conducts research on the modern transformation of Korea, broadly conceived.  He is the author of Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea (2004), and co-edited, with Professor Gi-Wook Shin of Stanford, Contentious Kwangju:  The May 1980 Uprising in Korea's Past and Present (2003).  His latest book, History of Korea: An Episodic Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan) is expected to be published in 2010.  He teaches courses on Korean history and society, East Asian and world history at the University of Southern California.  He is a graduate of Oberlin College (AB) and Harvard University (Ph.D).

This seminar is supported by a generous grant from Koret Foundation.