The Korea Institute is pleased to announce the 2017-18 Kim Koo Visiting Professor at Harvard University.
Tae Gyun Park, Kim Koo Visiting Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, 2017-18
(Headshot image of Dr. Tae Gyun Park)
In academic year 1997-1999 while an advanced graduate student at the Department of Korean History, Seoul National University, Park was a Visiting Fellow and Special Student at the Harvard-Yenching Institute. After receiving his doctorate in 2000 at Seoul National University, he has been teaching at the Graduate School of International Studies [GSIS], Seoul National University, including a popular undergraduate course called, “The Korea War,” and a graduate course called, “The Modern Korean History and Society” since 2000. He was Director at the International Center for Korean Studies, SNU between 2008 and 2013. Tae Gyun Park had a pro-seminar course on the 1950s Korea with Prof. Carter J. Eckert at Harvard in academic year 2007 and 2008, and continues to have collaboration with him to examine the Korean Peninsula in the 1960s and 1970s. His book, The Korean War: Unended But Should Be Ended (2005), is now in the fourteenth printing of the first edition, and The Vietnam War, A War Forgotten and Defective Memory (2015), is the fourth printing of the first edition, which are the steady sellers in South Korea. His book on the history of Korea’s relationship with the US, entitled The Ally and Empire, Two Myths of South Korea-United States Relations, 1945-1980, was translated into English in 2013. He was an advisor for the Ministry of Unification in 2013 and has been working for the Korea Foundation as a member of the advisory committee since 2011.
The Kim Koo Visiting Professorship at Harvard University was established by the gift of Dr. Ho Youn Kim and Mrs. Mee Kim of the Kim Koo Foundation, in honor of the memory of Kim Koo, the famous Korean patriot, and president of the exiled Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea during Korea’s colonial occupation by Japan.