People
Board of Directors
KPI’s board of directors represents our vision as an academic-community partnership. Board members bring decades of experience to KPI from academia, community-based organizations, media, and policy analysis.
Simone Chun
Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She currently serves on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors and the advisory board for CODEPINK. She has over 20 years of teaching and research experience in the United States and has been a central contributor to the creation of a number of interdisciplinary Asian and Korean Studies degree programs. She has presented widely on inter-Korean relations at established venues such as the Woodrow Wilson International Center for International Scholars, regularly contributed to such progressive media as the Common Dreams, Hankyoreh, Truthout, Responsible Statecraft, and Counterpunch, and organized webinars on topics related to the emerging Cold War in East Asia, such as a JNC TV-sponsored webinar with Noam Chomsky on Korea's sovereignty and the quest for peace in the Asia Pacific. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, an associate-in-research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute, and a lecturer at Northeastern University.
Christine Hong
Christine Hong is Associate Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The Price of Inclusion: Race, Militarism, and the Pax Americana in Cold War Asia and the Pacific. Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral-history project. As a former steering committee member of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, she helped launch the three-year Teaching Initiative to End the Korean War, in which over eighty academics took part. She served as the guest co-editor of Reframing North Human Rights, a two-part 2013-14 thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies, and The Unending Korean War, a 2015 special issue of positions: asia critique. She currently also serves on the steering committee of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association.
Martin Hart-Landsberg
Martin Hart-Landsberg is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon and Adjunct Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, South Korea. He is the author/editor of seven books, including Capitalist Globalization: Consequences, Resistance, and Alternatives; Marxist Perspectives on South Korea in the Global Economy; Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign Policy; and The Rush to Development: Economic Change and Political Struggle in South Korea. He is a member of the steering committee of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea and has served as consultant for the Korea program of the American Friends Service Committee. He is also the chair of Portland Rising, a committee of Portland Jobs With Justice, and a member of the Workers’ Rights Board in Portland, Oregon.
Gregory Elich
Gregory Elich is a frequent contributor to Counterpunch, an occasional writer for the Korean news site Voice of the People, and several print publications. He is a contributor to the collection Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy (Haymarket Books), and in 1999, he was a member of a team that visited Yugoslavia to investigate NATO war crimes. With Tim Beal, he co-authored the introduction to the reissued edition of I.F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War (Monthly Review).
Haeyoung Kim
Haeyoung Kim has worked as a policy analyst and researcher with the Office of Korean Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, the California State Assembly, the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice in Seoul, the International Forum on Globalization in San Francisco, and the Center for International Policy’s Asia Program in Washington, DC. Her research has been focused on multilateral and bilateral trade agreements, international energy policy, globalization, and environmental justice. She earned her PhD, MA, and BA from The University of Chicago, and her Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government where she was Co-Chair of the National Asian Pacific American Conference on Law and Public Policy and Senior Editor of the Asian American Policy Review. She is currently Assistant Professor in East Asian History in the Department of History at San Francisco State University.
Paul Liem
Paul Liem has been active on Korean peninsular issues for four decades and has visited North Korea in three different decades. In the 1970s he was a writer for The Korea Bulletin and editor of The Korea Commentary, both newsletters covering current events in North and South Korea. In the 1980s Mr. Liem assisted in sending delegations of progressive religious leaders, including members of the National Council of Churches, to North Korea. In the 1990s he served as advisor to the Berkeley Annual Reunification Symposia Series that hosted guest speakers from North and South Korea from 1991 to 1997. In 1992 Liem and other Korean American activists and artists organized a Korea American Arts Festival at the Oakland Museum among other venues, and in 2004 he served on the Korean American Centennial Committee that curated a multi-media oral history exhibit with the Oakland Museum celebrating 100 years of Korean immigration to the U.S.
Juyeon Rhee
Juyeon Rhee is a first generation Korean immigrant grassroots organizer who has worked for decades on de-militarization, peace and unification in Korea. Juyeon has been a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development since 2000 and is currently on the board. She formerly served as the main organizer of Nodutdol’s KEEP (Korea Education and Exposure Programs), which educates and sends Korean Americans to North and South Korea who return resolved to work for peace and social justice. She has led Nodutdol’s Korean Language Program, study groups on Korea and U.S. militarism on Asia/Pacific regions, and its Peace Treaty Campaign. From 1991 to 1998, she was a member of the Center for Korean American Culture (우리문화찾기회) and served as the Executive Director from 1993 to 1995. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from SUNY at Stony Brook, a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School and an Associate degree in Science from the Massage Therapy program at Swedish Institute in New York.
J.T. Takagi
J.T. (Orinne) Takagi is an Asian American activist and independent filmmaker. Ms. Takagi has directed many films, several of which are on Korean peninsular issues including Homes Apart: Korea; The Women Outside; and North Korea: Beyond the DMZ (the latter two with Hye-Jung Park), all of which aired on PBS. She teaches at the City College of New York, and the School of Visual Arts, and works with Third World Newsreel, an alternative media center. A recipient of many awards and fellowships, Takagi works with the National Campaign to End the Korean War and local NYC community groups, and as a sound engineer, has worked on many public television documentaries, with Emmy and Cinema Audio Society nominations.
Associates
Christine Ahn
Christine Ahn, a co-founder of the Korea Policy Institute, is a policy analyst with expertise in Korea, globalization, militarism, women’s rights and philanthropy. She has addressed Congress, the United Nations and the National Human Rights Commission in South Korea. Ms. Ahn has appeared on Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, NPR, NBC, and Voice of America. She is a columnist at the Institute for Policy Studies’ Foreign Policy In Focus, and her op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Fortune, and The Nation. She is co-founder of the National Campaign to End the Korean War, Korean Americans for Fair Trade, and founder and International Coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure women’s leadership in peace building. Ms. Ahn holds a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University and a certificate in ecological horticulture from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Patrick Chung
Patrick Chung is an assistant professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He specializes in global U.S. history, with interests in U.S. military, South Korean and Asian American history. His current research focuses on the relationship between the growth of the military-industrial complex in the United States and the industrialization of East Asia. He is working on a book manuscript (Making Korea Global) that uses South Korea’s postwar economic “miracle” to historicize the emergence of a U.S.-led global capitalist system during the Cold War. His work has been published in Diplomatic History Radical History Review, and two edited volumes, Korea and the World: New Frontiers in Korean Studies (2019) and The Military and the Market (2022).
Bruce Cumings
Bruce Cumings is professor of history at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on modern Korean history, international history, U.S.-East Asian relations, and East Asian political economy. He is the author of the two-volume study, The Origins of the Korean War; Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History; Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American—East Asian Relations; North Korea: Another Country; The Korean War: A History; Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. He is the co-author of Inventing the Axis of Evil and is the editor of the modern volume of the Cambridge History of Korea. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, NEH, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Abe Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council. In 2007 he won the Kim Dae Jung Prize for Scholarly Contributions to Democracy, Human Rights, and Peace.
Henry Em
Henry Em is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the Underwood International College of Yonsei University. His teaching and research interests include Korean historiography, nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism in twentieth-century Korea, transnational and cultural studies of the Korean War, and the Korean diaspora. He was the recipient of a Fulbright, as well as grants from the Freeman Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea was published by Duke University Press in 2013. His chapter on modern Korean historiography also appears in volume 5 of the Oxford History of Historical Writing from Oxford University Press.
John Feffer
John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of several books and numerous articles. His books include North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003), Shock Waves: Eastern Europe after the Revolutions (South End, 1992), and Beyond Detente: Soviet Foreign Policy and U.S. Options (Hill & Wang, 1990). He has edited several collections including Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Politics after September 11 (Seven Stories, 2003) and Europe’s New Nationalism, with Richard Caplan (Oxford University Press, 1996). His articles have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, The American Prospect, Newsday, The Nation, Asiaweek, Salon.com, TomPaine.com, YaleGlobal Online, AlterNet, The Progressive, Vegetarian Times, The Washingtonian, and Commonweal, among other publications. He’s been widely interviewed in print and on radio and is a former associate editor of World Policy Journal.
Pilju Kim Joo
Pilju Kim Joo, Ph.D., is the President of Agglobe Services International, a development aid organization providing humanitarian and agricultural assistance to North Korea. Born in North Korea before the country was divided, and raised in South Korea, Dr. Joo studied agriculture at Seoul National University and later received her doctorate from Cornell University. Dr. Joo has worked with major seed companies, including Northrup King and Pioneer Hi-bred International. She has been to North Korea over 60 times and has brought with her millions of dollars worth of farming knowledge, technology, and supplies to several cooperative farms. She secured one of the first contracts with the North Korean government to work with several dozen cooperative farms on developing their agriculture, including helping them to identify export markets to generate income.
Elaine H. Kim
Elaine H. Kim is a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also received her Ph.D. She is the author/editor/co-editor of ten books, including Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Issues in Asian American Visual Art, Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, Making Waves: Writings By and About Asian American Women, and Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context. She produced and directed Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded and co-produced Labor Women, Sa-i-Ku: From Korean Women’s Perspectives, and Slaying the Dragon: Asian Women in U.S. Television and Film. Kim co-founded Asian Women United of California, the Oakland Korean Community Center, and the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates. She served on the President’s Commission on Women in U.S. History and received honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as the Association of Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award.
Junyoung Verónica Kim
Junyoung Verónica Kim is a visiting scholar at the Center for Korean Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Both transregional and interdisciplinary in scope, her field of research includes East Asian and Latin American literature and media, cultural studies, critical race and gender studies, and immigration history. She has published articles on Korean immigration in Argentina, the Global South project, Transpacific Studies, Asian-Latin American literature, and Latin American involvement during the Korean War. She is on the editorial board for the book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia” for Palgrave Macmillian, and “Between Asias and Americas” for University of Pittsburgh Press, and serves on the executive committees of numerous scholarly organizations. Her book in progress, Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America, explores the cultural and migratory flows between East Asia and Latin America by looking at literature, cinema, and East Asian immigration history in Latin America. She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War that undertakes an exploration of transpacific relations of labor, militarization, racialization, and solidarity that arise during the Korean War.
Thomas P. Kim
Thomas Kim, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Scripps College. Dr. Kim has been interviewed dozens of times on U.S. and international radio and television, and his insights have been published or broadcast via major news sources including National Public Radio, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Congressional Quarterly Weekly, USA Today, The San Diego Union-Tribune, New York Newsday, and The Nation. He has been published in the U.S. Congressional Record and provided testimony in a U.S. Congressional briefing on U.S.-North Korea relations. Dr. Kim is the author of The Racial Logic of Politics: Asian Americans and Two-Party Competition (Temple University Press, 2006). From 2006 to 2010 he served as the Executive Director of KPI.
Namhee Lee
Namhee Lee, Ph.D., is a professor of East Asian Languages and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Professor Lee’s research interests include 20th Century Korean Social and Cultural History, Modernity and Nationalism, Comparative Social Movements in East Asia, and Korean American studies. Her publications include, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea, “Anti-Communism, North Korea, and Human Rights in South Korea: ‘Orientalist’ Discourse and Construction of South Korean Identity,” “The South Korean Student Movement: ‘Undongkwon’ as a Counterpublic Space,” and “The South Korean Student Movement, 1980-1987.”
Hyun Lee
Hyun Lee (9/20/70-3/7/22) was a life long activist for Korea Peace and social change in the US. She worked with many progressive groups including the Korea Policy Institute, and most recently was the National Campaign and Advocacy Strategist for Women Cross DMZ, a group advocating for Korea Peace. She was editor and writer for ZoominKorea, an online resource for critical news and analysis on peace and democracy in Korea. An anti-war activist and organizer who has traveled to both North and South Korea, she spoke at numerous national and international conferences, webinars and public seminars. Her writings have appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, Asia-Pacific Journal, and New Left Project, and she had been interviewed by numerous journals, new outlets and radio shows.
Ramsay Liem
Ramsay Liem is emeritus professor of psychology at Boston College. He is a founding member of the Asian American Studies program in which he continues to teach. He directs the Memories of the Korean War Oral History Project and, with a collective of Korean American artists, a filmmaker, and a historian, produced the exhibition, Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War”. He is the executive producer of the award winning documentary film, Memory of Forgotten War co-directed with Deann Borshay Liem. He serves as the president of the Channing and Popai Liem Education Foundation, which promotes awareness of U.S./Korea relations in support of peaceful reunification. He works with the Present Collective, a group of artists, scholars, and activists begun by members of the Still Present Pasts collective. Liem is active with the National Campaign to End the Korean War, the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, and a California-based oral history project recording legacies of the Korean War.
Wol-san Liem
Wol-san Liem is the Director of International Affairs for the Korean Federation of Public and Social Services and Transportation Workers’ Unions. She has been an activist and researcher in South Korea since 2006, working in a number of organizations including the Migrants Trade Union, the Korean Alliance against the KORUS FTA and the Research Institute for Alternative Workers Movements. Her work has focused on opposing racial capitalism and strengthening workers’ international solidarity. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from the New York University History Department in 2010.
Hye-Jung Park
Hye-Jung Park is a media and community activist who has been active in transnational social movements for over two decades. She is the Associate Director of Scribe Video Center, and has previously served as the Director of Language Programs at Unidad Academica Campesina – Carmen Pampa in Bolivia, the Media Program Officer at the Funding Exchange, Director of the Youth Channel at the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, and Director of Programs at DCTV, a NYC media center. Ms. Park has served on the boards of artist and community organizations, including Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, the North Star Fund, the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, Videazimut (an international coalition of community media), and the Rainbow Korean Women’s Center. An award-winning producer, she has produced several documentaries with J.T. Takagi that include The Women Outside, North Korea: Beyond DMZ, and The #7 Train: An Immigrant Journey. Ms. Park has designed and taught courses on Asian and African American Media at several New York colleges.
Kee B. Park
Kee B. Park, MD, MPH, is a lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine and Director of the Korea Health Policy Project at Harvard Medical School. He also serves as Director of the North Korea Programs at the Korean American Medical Association, and has led over 20 delegations to North Korea since 2007 to work alongside and collaborate with North Korean doctors in the DPRK. Dr. Park is a consultant for the World Health Organization and serves on the WHO Expert Advisory Panel on Surgical Care and Anesthesia. In this capacity, he advocates for and assists in the development of national surgical plans by the Member States. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Neurological Surgery, a member of the Advisory Committee for the Foundation of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies, member of the National Committee on North Korea, and member of Council of Korean Americans. Dr. Park obtained his medical degree from Rutgers University, trained in neurosurgery at the Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and earned a Master of Public Health from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Tim Shorrock
Tim Shorrock is a journalist and trade unionist based in Washington, D.C. He spent part of his childhood in South Korea, when his father was working in Seoul as a missionary, and has been writing about Korean affairs since the late 1970s. During the 1980s, when South Korea was under harsh military rule, Tim visited the country often and wrote extensively about the US role in Korea and its support for the military regime. He is well-known for exposing the Carter administration’s background support for the military crackdown on the democratic movement in 1980 and the events that led to the insurrection and massacre in Kwangju. His writings on Korea have appeared in the Daily Beast, The Progressive, The Nation, as well as publications in South Korea.
Hazel Smith
Hazel Smith is Professor of Humanitarianism and Security at Cranfield University, UK, a member of the Research Committee of the UK Economic and Social Research Council and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her research focuses on the economics, society, politics and international relations of North Korea. She has researched the country for over twenty years and lived and worked in North Korea for nearly two years, on secondment to UNICEF and the World Food Programme. In 2009, she was asked by the UN Secretariat to be part of its global expert panel on Korea. She has published extensively on North Korea including the UNICEF Situation Analysis of Children and Women in the DPRK and Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance and Social Change in North Korea (2005). Dr. Smith has been interviewed by the BBC, KBS, Voice of America, NPR, CNN, CBS, ABC, and PBS, and was invited to testify at the UK House of Commons on Korean security.
Dae-Han Song
Dae-Han Song is the Policy and Research Coordinator at the International Strategy Center (goisc.org/home), an organization in Korea focused on building bridges between social movements in Korea and those abroad. He is a graduate from the Labor/Community Strategy Center’s National School for Strategic Organizing in Los Angeles and organized in the Bus Riders Union. Previous to that, he organized API high school students in the Bay Area for Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL). In 2007, he participated in Nodutdol’s DPRK Education and Exposure Program (DEEP).
Seung Hye Suh
Seung Hye Suh is the executive director of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA) in Los Angeles and an M.S. candidate in Regenerative Studies at Cal Poly Pomona. She is also a member of the steering committee of Nanum Corean Cultural School. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and was a professor at Scripps College until 2009, specializing in American literature and culture, Asian American Studies, and cultural theory. She continues to teach occasionally in Asian American Studies and ecological justice at the Claremont Colleges. She is a former member of the KPI Board, former steering committee member of the Alliance for Scholars Concerned About Korea, and brings scholarly expertise together with 15 years experience working with community-based organizations in New York and Los Angeles.
Moe Taylor
Moe Taylor is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) scholar, a Senior Policy Analyst with the Canadian government, and a community organizer. He holds a PhD in History from the University of British Columbia (UBC), and previously held academic appointments in the United States and South Korea. His scholarship focuses on DPRK-Latin America relations, the role of the DPRK in international projects of South-South solidarity, and issues of agriculture, farm mechanization, and food security on the Korean peninsula. He is the author of North Korea, Tricontinentalism, and the Latin American Revolution, 1959–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and The Tractor is Rice, and Rice is Socialism: Mechanized Farming, the Cold War, and the Two Koreas (Asia Culture Center, 2022). His articles have appeared in journals such as Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Latin America Studies, North Korean Review, Journal of Global South Studies, and Asia-Pacific Journal.
Ji-Yeon Yuh
Ji-Yeon Yuh is an associate professor of history and the founding director of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University. She is the author of Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America. Her current projects include a history of Koreans in China, Japan, and the United States; a study of reunification and Korea peace activism in the Korean diaspora; and the Asian Diaspora Oral History Repository. She is the Midwest coordinator for the Korea Peace Now Grassroots Network, a core member of the Ending The Korean War Teaching Collective, and a co-founder of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea. She was the historical consultant for Still Presents Pasts, an exhibit on Korean Americans and the Korean War, and Crossing East, a radio documentary on Asian Americans. She is the co-founder and board president of the Korean Performing Arts Institute of Chicago and a former board president of KAN-WIN, an Asian American women’s anti-gender-violence organization.
