LOCATION
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall
616 Serra St., 3rd floor
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
» Directions/Map
____________________________________________________________________________
The 1950s, the period between the catastrophic Korean War (1950-1953) and Korea’s ambitious industrialization in the 1960s and 70s, has remained relatively "neglected" among historians of modern Korea. The guest speakers will present their studies of this era’s culture, intellectual climate, and politics; and discuss colonial legacy, cold war, and reconstruction in the wake of the Korean War.
Participants:
Carter J. Eckert trained in Western ancient and medieval history at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, and also at Harvard. He subsequently developed a strong interest in Korea and East Asia as a result of his experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Seoul in the late 1960s and 1970s. After several years of working and studying in Korea, he returned to the United States for doctoral study in Korean and Japanese history at the University of Washington. Since 1985 he has been teaching modern Korean history at Harvard, including a popular undergraduate course called "The Two Koreas," and working to build up the Harvard Korean studies program.
Eckert is the author of a number of books and articles, including Offspring of Empire: The Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, and he is also a co-author of Korea Old and New: A History, a widely-used university textbook on Korean history.
Michael Robinson earned a PhD in history at the University of Washington in 1979. He taught at the University of Southern California for sixteen years after which he moved to Indiana University where he is a Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and an adjunct Professor of History. He has written extensively on the origins and evolution of Korean nationalism. His first book, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea focused on nationalist ideology formation during the 1920s. More recently he has become interested in popular culture and the origins and development of modernity in Korea. With Gi-Wook Shin his Colonial Modernity in Korea examined a number of nodes of modernity appearing during the period of Japanese occupation. He has just finished a new book, Korea’s Twentieth Century Odyssey: a Short History that was published by the University of Hawaii Press in Spring 2007. He has collaborated with Jonathan Lipman and Barbara Maloney on a new text, East Asia Since 1600, published in 2012 by Littlefield Press in London.
Robinson has worked extensively in program development at the university and national level with a special focus on Korean Studies.
Tae Gyun Park is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University and an Advisor to Minitry of Unification in Korea. He was a Coordinate Researcher at Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2007-2008. He authored An Ally and Empire: Two Myths in Korea-U.S. Relationship (AKS Press,2012) and "Beyond the Myth: Reassessing the Security Crisis in the mid 1960s on the Korean Peninsula" (Pacific Affairs, 2009).
Yumi Moon is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University where she has taught modern Korean history since 2007. She received her undergraduate degree and an MA in Political Science and International Relations from Seoul National University, and a PhD in East Asian Studies from Harvard University.
Moon is the author of Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910 (Cornell University Press, 2013). She is currently working on a new book tentatively titled Toward a Free State: Imperial Shift and the Formation of Post-Colonial South Korea, 1931–1950.
