Social Sciences Lecture: "North Korea: Still in the Axis of Evil?"
Wednesday, April 29
4 - 5:30 p.m.
Wishnick Hall, room 113
The Department of Social Sciences welcomes Bruce Cumings, Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, for a presentation "North Korea: Still in the Axis of Evil?," from 4 - 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29 in Wishnick Hall, room 113.
Professor Cumings will examine the disconnect between the long history of confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea, going back more than 60 years now, and the American transformation of North Korea first into a "rogue state" in the early 1990s, and then into part of the "axis of evil" in 2002.
The American media and most pundits hardly ever examine the background to our conflict with Pyongyang, which includes not just the American Military Government in South Korea from 1945 to 1948 and the Korean War (1950-53), but the American role in introducing nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula in 1958 and keeping hundreds of them there until 1991.
Today, after North Korea challenged President Obama by attempting to put a satellite in orbit, his administration inherits a long-running confrontation with no sign that it will end any time soon.
Bruce Cumings teaches international history, modern Korean history and East Asian political economy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the two-volume study, The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990), which won the John King Fairbank Book Award of the American Historical Association (v. 1) and the Quincy Wright Book Award of the International Studies Association (v. 2).
He also authored War and Television (Visal-Routledge, 1992), Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (W. W. Norton, 1997; updated ed., 2006), Parallax Visions: Making Sense of AmericanEast Asian Relations (Duke University Press, 1999; paperback 2002), North Korea: Another Country (New Press, 2003), co-authored Inventing the Axis of Evil (New Press, 2004), and is the editor of the modern volume of the Cambridge History of Korea (forthcoming).
He was elected to the American Academy of Art s and Sciences in 1999, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, NEH, the MacArthur Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford, and the Abe Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council.
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