About the Speakers

Alexis Dudden is professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches modern Japanese, Korean, and international history. Dudden received her BA from Columbia University in 1991 and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1998. She has lived and studied for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea, with awards from Fulbright, ACLS, NEH, and SSRC as well as fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. She is the 2015 recipient of the Manhae Peace Prize, and her books include Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States (Columbia) and Japan’s Colonization of Korea (Hawaii). Currently, Dudden’s research centers on Japan’s territorial contests with regional neighbors, completing a book project tentatively called, The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850-2020 (with Oxford). She publishes regularly in print and online media, most recently, "America's Dirty Secret in East Asia" (NYT) and "Japan's Rising Sun Flag Has a History of Horror" (Guardian).

Professor Stephen Noerper (moderator) teaches Northeast Asia and Korean Peninsula relations at Columbia SIPA and in the department of political science at Columbia University. He is a Korea Society senior director for policy, research scholar at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and a senior advisor to the United Nations program in support of cooperation in Northeast Asia. Previously, he was a senior fellow and director at the EastWest Institute, an associate professor of international relations at New York University, an adjunct professor at American University, and a visiting full professor to the National University of Mongolia--where he was a Fulbright senior scholar--and Waseda University. Dr. Noerper was an Intellibridge vice president, State Department senior analyst, and an associate and assistant professor at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii. He was an East-West Center fellow and Washington representative for the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development. The author of more than seventy publications on US policy, Korea and Northeast Asia, he has appeared widely on radio and television, to include the BBC, Bloomberg, CBC, CNN, NHK, NPR and VOA and in The Wall Street Journal and other print. He holds advanced degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and London School of Economics. He is a member of the National Committee on North Korea and has sat on several philanthropic boards.