Category: 2020-2021

Speaker

Hung-jen Wang

Associate Professor of Political Science, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan; East Asia Voices Initiative (EAVI) Fellow, East Asia NRC  

Moderator

Graham Cornwell

 Assistant Dean of Research, Elliott School of International Affairs

Speaker

Hung-jen Wang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. His research interests focus mainly on Post-/Non-Western IR theory, Chinese foreign policy, and the cross-Taiwan Strait relations. Dr. Wang is the author of the book, The Rise of China and Chinese International Relations (IR) Scholarship (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), and co-author of China and International Theory: The Balance of Relationships (Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2019). He has also published journal articles in The China Quarterly, Global Constitutionalism, and others. He received PhD in International Politics from ERCCT/Political Science department at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Speakers

Ho-Young Ahn is the President of the University of North Korean Studies, a premier institution for research and education on North Korea related issues. Ambassador Ahn served as the Republic of Korea’s Ambassador to the United States (2013-17), Deputy Minister for Trade at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador to the European Union and Belgium, and the First Vice Foreign Minister. Ambassador Ahn studied international relations and law at Seoul National University (BA), Georgetown University (MS), Korea National Open University (LLB) and the Georgetown Law School (LLM). He received a Ph.D degree (Hon) in political science from Kyung-Nam University.

Kathleen Stephens is the President and CEO of the Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI). A former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, she served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea from 2008 to 2011. Her other overseas assignments included postings to China, former Yugoslavia, Portugal, Northern Ireland, where she was U.S. Consul General in Belfast during the negotiations culminating in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and India, where she was U.S. Charge ‘d Affaires (2014-2015). Ambassador Stephens also served in a number of policy positions in Washington at the Department of State and the White House. These included acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (2012), Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (2005-2007), Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (2003-2005), and National Security Council Director for European Affairs at the Clinton White House.

Frank Jannuzi joined the Mansfield Foundation as President and Chief Executive Officer in April 2014. He previously served as Deputy Executive Director (Advocacy, Policy and Research) at Amnesty International, USA. There he shaped and promoted legislation and policies to advance universal human rights, protect individuals and communities at risk, and free prisoners of conscience. From 1997-2012 Mr. Jannuzi was Policy Director, East Asian and Pacific Affairs, for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he advised Committee Chairmen Joseph Biden and John Kerry on a range of security, political, economic, and human rights issues pertinent to U.S. relations with East Asia. During his tenure with the Foreign Relations Committee he also was a Hitachi Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations from 2006-2007, serving as a visiting lecturer at Keio University and a visiting scholar at the Institute of International Policy Studies in Tokyo.  Early in his career he served for nine years as an analyst in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Mr. Jannuzi holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and Master in Public Policy degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.  He has traveled throughout Asia and has written extensively on East Asia policy issues, including U.S. relations with Japan, China, and North Korea.

Jung-Chul Lee is a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Seoul National University. He was a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Soongsil University (2006-2021) and the Chief of Economic Security Research Team at the Samsung Economic Research Institute (2002-2006). In 2014 he served as a visiting scholar at the George Washington University’s Sigur Center for Asian Studies. He has written many books and articles on North Korea, including “Sanctions for Nuclear Inhibition: Comparing Sanction Conditions between Iran and North Korea”(Asian Perspective, 2019), “Costly Signals, Failed Deterrence and a New Alternative”(Legislative Studies in Korean, 2017), “Obama Doctrine and US Policy towards North Korea: Geopolitics, Nuclear Strategy, and Value iplomacy,” (Journal of Korean Politics in Korean, 2016) and “Making Sense of North Korea: How to Respond to Pyongyang’s Charm Offensive,”(Foreign Affairs, 2015). He holds a Bachelor of Laws degree (1991) from Seoul National University and an M.A. (1997) in Political Science from Seoul National University. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at Seoul National University in 2002.

Celeste Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at GW. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research and teaching focus on law and social movements, the media, lawyers, policy processes, historical justice, North Korean human rights, and qualitative methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism. She is the author of Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (2016) and has published in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, and theWashington Post, among others. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. from Princeton University. She is currently writing a book that analyzes the role of lawyers and legal activism in Japanese and Korean policies related to persons with disabilities and tobacco control.

Yeon-Chul Kim is the chairman of the board of the Korea Peace Forum and a professor of the Department of Korea Unification at Inje University. He served as the Republic of Korea’s Minister of Unification. Prior to that, he was the president of the Korea Institute for National Unification and served as a policy advisor to Minister of Unification. He worked as a chief researcher at Samsung Economic Research Institute and a research professor at the Asiatic Research Institute (ARI), Korea University. He is the author of Dialogue of the Past 70 Years: Re-evaluating the History of Inter-Korean Relations and The Strategy of Negotiation. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Sungkyunkwan University.

Moderator

Yonho Kim is an Associate Research Professor of Practice and the Associate Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. He specializes in North Korea’s mobile telecommunications and U.S. policy towards North Korea. Kim is the author of  North Korean Phone Money: Airtime Transfers as a Precursor to Mobile Payment System (2020), North Korea’s Mobile Telecommunications and Private Transportation Services in the Kim Jong-un Era (2019) and Cell Phones in North Korea: Has North Korea Entered the Telecommunications Revolution? (2014). His research findings were covered by various media outlets, including Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Yonhap News, and Libération. Prior to joining GWIKS, he extensively interacted with the Washington policy circle on the Korean peninsula as Senior Researcher of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Senior Reporter for Voice of America’s Korean Service, and Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council’s Program on Korea in Transition. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in International Relations from Seoul National University, and an M.A. in International Relations and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Speakers

Ben de Guzman,

Director, DC Mayor’s Office on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs (opening remarks)

Dr. Patricia Chu

Professor of English; Deputy Chair of the Department of English, The George Washington University

Dr. Pawan Dhingra

Professor of American Studies; Faculty Equity and Inclusion Officer, Amherst College

Audrey Pan

Community Organizer and Programs Associate, OCA-GH; Programs Chair, Chinatown Youth Initiatives

Rui Zhong

Program Associate, Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, Wilson Center

Hye Jun Seo

MA Asian Studies student, The George Washington University

Daphne Lee

Journalist (CBS, VICE, Nikkei Asia, Goldthread and others)

Moderator

Dr. Jisoo Kim

Co-Director, East Asia NRC; Director, GW Institute for Korean Studies; Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures, George Washington University

Speakers

Ben de Guzman is the Director of the Mayor’s Office on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs (MOAPIA). He has been a leading voice at the local and national level on issues of racial equity, immigrants’ rights, veterans’ affairs, and LGBT justice for twenty years. He comes to MOAPIA from the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, where he served as the Community Outreach Specialist. During his tenure there, he helped execute two major first time events for the Office- the “District of Pride” LGBTQ cultural performance event and the 32nd Annual 17th Street High Heel Race, presented by the Mayor’s Office as lead organizer. He also served as both the Public Information Officer and the Americans with Disabilities Act Compliance Officer for the agency.

Patricia Chu is a professor of English and the Deputy Chair of the Department of English at the George Washington University. She studies Asian American and diasporic literature and film, Asian American Studies, and Women’s writing and autobiography. Her two most recent research projects have been informed by her own familt’s history of migration, loss and assimilation, and questions about understanding the past. She has released several publictions, including Where I Have Never Been: Asian American Narratives of Return, and In My Grandmother’s House which have been supported by a Columbian College Facilitating Grant and by a Robert H. Smith Research Fellowship.

Pawan Dhingra is an author, professor, and former curator and senior advisor of the Smithsonian Institution exhibition, Beyond Bollywood: Asian Indian Americans Shape the Nation. His byline includes The New York Times, CNN, The Conversation, Indian Express, and many other venues, and he and his work have been profiled in The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, Times of India, and elsewhere. His most recent book Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (New York University Press 2020) has been profiled in these and other venues, and which author Min Jin Lee has said, “gets to the root of education obsessions.” He speaks from this work in the Netflix documentary, Spelling the Dream. He is the author of the award-winning Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Stanford University Press, 2012), which also has been profiled nationwide and internationally. He also authored the award-winning Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (Stanford University Press, 2007). Professor Dhingra co-authored the review text, Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, which is in its second edition (Polity Press, 2014 and 2021). He has served as president of the board of the South Asian American Digital Archive.

Audrey Pan is a Community Organizer and Programs Associates at OCA-GH where she works to strengthen the infrastructure of our youth programming and instill a culture of year-round civic engagement, political consciousness raising and arts & culture programming four our larger AAPI communities. In doing so, the hope is that the AAPI community will have the capacity to exert an influential voice in the public policy arena and in the social, racial and economic justice movement. Born and raised in NYC, she is also on the young professionals board of Chinatown Youth Initiatives whose power is to empower New York City youth with the knowledge and skills necessary to address the needs of Chinatown, Asian Americans, and other underrepresented communities. She grew up in NYC’s Chinatown and as the daughter of Chinese immigrants and former garment workers, she has always been a fierce advocate for fair and humane immigration policies and labor conditions. She holds a BA from Middlebury College in Sociology with minors in Education and Spanish and will begin law school this incoming fall to pursue community lawyering.

Rui Zhong is the Program Associate for the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center. She holds an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a BA in International Studies from Emory University. She has completed coursework at Peking University and earned a graduate certificate at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China. At the Kissinger Institute, she manages Mapping China’s Cultural Genome, a curated project that collects top-level speeches and commentary on China’s global cultural ambitions. Her research interests include China’s role in the East Asian Political Economy and how nationalist interests can impact business, technology and cultural policies. Rui’s writing has appeared in Foreign Policy,The Washington Post, Chinafile and more.

Daphne K. Lee is a New York-based journalist covering food and culture. Her work has appeared on CBS News, VICE, Goldthread, Popula, and more. She was previously an editor overseeing The News Lens International, a Taiwan-based digital media outlet.

Moderator

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies and the Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center at GW. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She is a specialist in gender, law, and emotions in Korean history. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Sexual Desire, Crime, and Gendered Subjects: A History of Adultery Law in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

Speaker

Congressman Andy Kim was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. He represents the Third Congressional District of New Jersey, which stretches from the Delaware River to the Jersey Shore encompassing most of Burlington County and parts of Ocean County. As a member of the House, Congressman Kim serves on the House Armed Services Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Committee on Small Business. In his first term, Congressman Kim passed bills into law that help military servicemembers and their families find economic opportunities and stopped the use of harmful chemicals that impact New Jersey’s water by the U.S. military. In addition, Congressman Kim has held more than two dozen town halls and has helped constituents by resolving more than 4,300 issues with federal agencies. Congressman Kim grew up in South Jersey, the proud son of Korean immigrants, where he attended public K-12 schools before becoming a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to serving in the House, Congressman Kim worked as a career public servant under both Democrats and Republicans. He served at USAID, the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House National Security Council, and in Afghanistan as an advisor to Generals Petraeus and Allen. He currently lives in Burlington county with his wife and two baby boys.

Moderator

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies and the Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center at GW. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She is a specialist in gender, law, and emotions in Korean history. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Sexual Desire, Crime, and Gendered Subjects: A History of Adultery Law in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

Speaker

Pil Ho Kim is an assistant professor of Korean at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Ohio State University. A sociologist by training, he has been studying and teaching a wide range of topics related to modern Korea, including popular music, cinema, literature, and urban regeneration/gentrification. He is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled, Gangnam: Global/Polarization of South Korea’s Dreamland, which casts a new light on the global rise of South Korean economy and popular culture by focusing on its geographic symbol, Gangnam. He has published research articles in positions: east asia cultures critique, Journal of Japanese and Asian Cinema, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Korea Observer, and Acta Koreana, among others.

Author

Dr. June Park is an East Asia Voices Initiative (EAVI) Fellow of the East Asia National Resource Center at the Elliot School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. She specializes in U.S. foreign economic policymaking on export-oriented countries of Northeast Asia – China, Japan and South Korea. She studies trade, energy, and tech conflicts with a broader range of regional focuses on the U.S., East Asia, Europe and the Middle East and intensive policy-oriented research on the two Koreas. She studies why countries fight and how, using what including why countries have different policy outcomes by analyzing governance structures – domestic institutions, leaderships, and bureaucracies that shape the policy formation process.

Recently, Dr. June Park was awarded the Fung Global Fellowship (Early-Career Scholar Track) at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University for the 2021-2022 academic year her my research proposal, ‘Governing a Pandemic with Data on the Contactless Path to AI.’

Discussant

Celeste Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at GW. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research and teaching focus on law and social movements, the media, lawyers, policy processes, historical justice, North Korean human rights, and qualitative methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism. She is the author of Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (2016) and has published in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, and the Washington Post, among others. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. from Princeton University. She is currently writing a book that analyzes the role of lawyers and legal activism in Japanese and Korean policies related to persons with disabilities and tobacco control.

Moderator

Yonho Kim is Associate Research Professor of Practice and Associate Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. He specializes in North Korea’s mobile telecommunications and U.S. policy towards North Korea. Kim is the author of North Korean Phone Money: Airtime Transfers as a Precursor to Mobile Payment System (2020), North Korea’s Mobile Telecommunications and Private Transportation Services in the Kim Jong-un Era (2019) and Cell Phones in North Korea: Has North Korea Entered the Telecommunications Revolution? (2014). His research findings were covered by various media outlets, including Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Yonhap News, and Libération. Prior to joining GWIKS, he extensively interacted with the Washington policy circle on the Korean peninsula as Senior Researcher of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Senior Reporter for Voice of America’s Korean Service, and Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council’s Program on Korea in Transition. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in International Relations from Seoul National University, and an M.A. in International Relations and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Speaker

Hongjian Wang

Assistant Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies, Purdue University

Author

Hongjian Wang is an Assistant Professor in Chinese at Purdue University. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 2012 from the University of California, Riverside, and her B.A. in English Language and Literature in 2006 from Nanjing University (China). Prior to her position at Purdue, she was an Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Arkansas.

Dr. Wang’s research interests cover modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, theater and cultural history. She has published an article on the photographic representation of modern Chinese masculinity in an anthology on the popular pictorial Liangyou in the Republican era. In addition to her manuscript on Decadence in twentieth-century Chinese literature, she is also working on three new projects, namely, Chinese independent documentary films, contemporary Chinese experimental theater, and the satirical skits in China’s national gala on TV during the Spring Festival.

Author

Dr. Liang Luo is a professor of Chinese studies, folklore & mythology, and gender and women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. Currently she teaches modern and classical Chinese language, modern and comptemporary chinese literature, comparative East Asian literature, gender politics in Chinese literature and culture, and Chinese film and popular culture. Early in her career, she was awarded a “Certificate of Distinction in Teaching” at Harvard University for her contribution to undergraduate teaching.

She has written many works including The Avant-garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics, The Global White Snake and most recently Profound Propaganda: The International Avant-Garde and Modern China an exploration of the relationship between the international avant-garde and modern China.

Her research has conducted interdisciplinary, multilingual and multi-site research in Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Furukawa, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Stockholm, Nijmegen, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Leiden, Taiwan, and Seoul in the broadly-defined fields of modern Chinese literature and culture, modern Japanese studies, performance studies, modernist studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.