Charles K. Armstrong

Charles King Armstrong is an academic, historian, and a Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences at Columbia University.

Early life

Armstrong earned B.A. at Yale University in 1984; and then he continued his studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, earning a diploma in Korean language in 1986. After receiving a M.Sc. at the London School of Economics in 1988, he was awarded a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1994.

Career

Charles Armstrong is a Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History and the Director of The Center for Korean Research. A specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, Professor Armstrong has written or edited numerous books on modern and contemporary Korea, including The Koreas (Routledge, 2007),The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell, 2003), Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006), Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State (Routledge, Second Edition 2006), and Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950 - 1990 (Cornell, forthcoming 2012). He is currently writing a history of modern East Asia for the Wiley-Blackwell series "Concise History of the Modern World." Professor Armstrong is also a frequent commentator in the US and international media on Korean, East Asian, and Asian-American affairs.

He joined the Columbia faculty in 1996 and teaches courses on Korean history, U.S.-East Asian relations, the Vietnam War, and approaches to international and global history. He is a frequent commentator in the U.S. and foreign mass media on contemporary Korean, East Asian, and Asian-American affairs.

He was a Visiting Professor in 2008 at the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University.

Criticism

Charles Armstrong’s book “Tyranny of the Weak” was criticized by various other North Korean scholars (Andrei Lankov, Balazs Szalontai, Brian Myers etc.) for its incorrect references. As Szalontai points out, many of the references in Armstong’s book rely on documents that either do not exist at all, or are completely unrelated to the subject. When NK News, a media site, which specializes in North Korea contacted Armstrong, he “did not comment on any specific issues critics have raised with the book”.

Selected works

Armstrong's published writings encompass 12 works in 35 publications in 2 languages.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

• 2013 — Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1990 (author)
• 2006 — The Koreas (author)
• 2006 — Korean society: civil society, democracy and the state (editor)
• 2005 — Korea at the center: dynamics of regionalism in Northeast Asia (co-editor with Samuel S. Kim, Stephen Kotkin and Gilbert Rozman)
• 2003 — The North Korean revolution, 1945-1950 (author)
• 2003 — North Korea beyond the DMZ (contributor in the documentary film directed and produced by J. T. Takagi and Hye-Jung Park)
• 2002 — Korean society civil society, democracy, and the state (editor)
• 1998 — North Korean foreign relations in the post-Cold War era (contributor; editor: Samuel S. Kim)
• 1994 — The origins and future demise of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (author)
• 1994 — State and social transformation in North Korea, 1945-1950 (author; Ph.D. thesis)
• 1990 — South Korea's 'Northern policy' (author; Pacific Review Volume 3, Issue 1)

Honors

• Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Grant, 2000.

External links

• The Korea Society Podcast: History of Korea Part 1&2, Charles Armstrong