About the Speakers

Michael Pettid is Professor of Premodern Korean Studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and also serves as the Director of the Translation Research and Instruction Program at Binghamton University (SUNY). He received his Ph.D. in premodern Korean literature from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and teaches courses on premodern Korean history, literature, religion and Confucianism. He has published widely on premodern Korea including several books, the most recent of which is a co-edited volume entitled Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: Critical Aspects of Death from Ancient to Contemporary Times (with Charlotte Horlyck, University of Hawaii Press, 2014). His current research projects include a translation of the 18th century Kyuhap ch’ongsŏ [Encyclopedia of women’s daily lives] and a co-edited anthology of premodern Korean prose.


Charles K. Armstrong is The Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is the former Director of Columbia’s Center for Korean Research and former Acting Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Professor Armstrong is the author, editor or co-editor of five books, including most recently Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950 – 1992 (Cornell University Press, 2013) and The Koreas (Routledge: second edition, 2014). His current research projects include a history of modern East Asia (forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell publishers), a study of American cultural policy in East Asia during the early Cold War, and the interaction between urbanization and the environment in North Korea and Northeast China. Professor Armstrong holds a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Yale University, an M.Sc. in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. He has taught at Princeton, the University of Washington, and Seoul National University, and joined the Columbia faculty in 1996.