The Korea Institute is pleased to announce the 2017-18 Kim Koo Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Seoul National University Professor Tae Gyun Park. Park was a Visiting Fellow and Special Student at the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 1997 to 1999 while an advanced graduate student at SNU's Department of Korean History. Since receiving his doctorate in 2000, he has taught at the SNU Graduate School of International Studies [GSIS], including popular undergraduate course “The Korean War” and graduate course “Modern Korean History and Society”. Professor Park also served as Director of the International Center for Korean Studies at SNU between 2008 and 2013. He taught a proseminar on 1950s Korea at Harvard with Professor Carter Eckert in 2007-08, and continues to collaborate with Professor Eckert examining the Korean Peninsula in the 1960s and 1970s. His book, The Korean War: Unended But Should Be Ended (2005), is now in its fourteenth printing, and The Vietnam War, A War Forgotten and Defective Memory (2015), is in its fourth, both steady sellers in South Korea. Professor Park's volume on the history of Korea’s relationship with the U.S., entitled The Ally and Empire, Two Myths of South Korea-United States Relations, 1945-1980 was translated into English in 2013. He served as advisor to the Ministry of Unification in 2013 and has served on the Korea Foundation's 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 celebrated Korean patriot Kim Koo, president of the exiled Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea during Korea’s colonial occupation by Japan.