The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 2nd Seong-Yawng Park GRD ’65 and Marguerite Clark Park Memorial Lecture.
Lecture will take place from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM in the Amphitheater Room 101 at Henry R. Luce Hall, followed by a reception in Luce Common Room from 5:30 PM to 6:15 PM.
Militarism has been deeply intertwined with Korean history and South Korean economic development, especially under the government of Park Chung Hee, who seized political control of the country in an army coup in 1961 and remained in power until his assassination in 1979. In his ongoing project Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea, the first volume of which, The Roots of Militarism 1866-1945, was published by Harvard University Press in 2016, Carter J. Eckert links South Korean militarism to the culture and practices of the Japanese-controlled Manchukuo Army, in which Park served in the 1940s. In his lecture Eckert discusses his work on the second volume of the project and the ways in which militarism was reinforced and reconfigured in the Republic of Korea Army and South Korea in the 1950s under American hegemony, providing a broad and accommodating historical context for Park’s coup in 1961.
The Seong-Yawng Park GRD ’65 and Marguerite Clark Park Memorial Lecture was made possible by a generous gift from the estate of the Park family. The principal objective of this gift is to foster the study of Korea at Yale by bringing recognition of the Korean peninsula and its affairs and achievements to Yale and the wider community.