Date and Time
November 17, 2006
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Availability
Open to the public
RSVP required by 5PM November 14

Speaker
Michael E. Robinson - Professor at Indiana University

Using his personal recollections of his life in the Peace Corps, Michael Robinson will discuss the issues of an evolution of Korean national identity and reflect as well on how political attitudes, perceptions of the U.S., ROK strategic policy, U.S. Cold War posturing, and Peace Corps idealism coexisted and produced its own baffling mix of political, cultural, and social cleavages.

His discussion will continue on how the disconnection of Korean youth from their parents' experience in the ambiguous political culture fostered by Cold War ideology during the late 1960s frees them to be a new kind of patriot and global citizen.

Michael Robinson earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Washington in 1979. He taught at the University of Southern California for sixteen years after which he moved to Indiana University where he is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and an adjunct Professor of History. He has written extensively on the origins and evolution of Korean nationalism. His first book, "Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea" focused on nationalist ideology formation during the 1920s. More recently he has become interested in popular culture and the origins and development of modernity in Korea. With Gi-Wook Shin his "Colonial Modernity in Korea" examined a number of nodes of modernity appearing during the period of Japanese occupation. He has just finished a new book, "Korea's Twentieth Century Odyssey: a Short History" that will be published by the University of Hawaii Press in spring 2007.