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'Bruce Cumings' is a historian, and professor at the University of Chicago, specializing in modern Korean history and contemporary international relations in East Asia.
In his youth, Cumings was a Peace Corps volunteer in South Korea. He was one of the founding members of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and published extensively in its journal, ''Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars''. His father conducted research for the Central Intelligence Agency. He is married to Meredith Jung-En Woo, a professor of political science, specializing in Korean politics, at the University of Michigan.
His research focus is on 20th century international history, relationships between the United States and East Asia, East Asian political economy, and modern Korean history.
He is presently completing a book entitled ''Industrial Behemoth: The Northeast Asian Political Economy in the 20th Century'', which seeks to understand the industrialization of Japan, both Koreas, Taiwan, and parts of China, and the ways that scholars and political leaders have viewed that development.
Cumings' works on Korea have been characterized by critics as having a left-wing, pro-North Korea bias and having tendentious or shoddy interpretations of evidence. [1] One such critic said "His eagerness to cast American officials and policy in the worst possible light, however, often leads him to confuse chronological cause and effect and to leap to judgments that cannot be supported by the documentation he cites or ignores," ^[1]. ''North Korea: Another Country'' has been characterized as being an apologia for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. [2] While he criticizes some of the DPRK's policies and aspects of its society and government, most of his criticism is reserved for South Korean political repression of leftists and US foreign policy, particularly conduct in the Korean War. Cumings argues that Korea would have been better off to have been united under the communist government of Kim Il Sung and develop on its own than to suffer the three year-long war and its lasting effects on society, particularly in the north.

Contents

References

Books

External links

References

1. Millet, ''The War for Korea 1945-1950'' (2005)

Books

★ ''The Origins of the Korean War (2 vols)''. Princeton University Press,1981, 1990.

★ ''Korea: The Unknown War'' by Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, London: Viking, 1988. Brief "photojournalism" account of the Korean War with many photographs.

★ ''War and Television''. Verso, 1993.

★ ''Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History.'' Norton, 1997.

★ ''Parallax Visions: American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century.'' Duke University Press, forthcoming.

★ ''North Korea: Another Country''. New Press, 2004.

External links

★ Faculty Profile on the University of Chicago's website.

★ Endgame in Korea - 2002 article by Cumings

★ Archive of articles published in the ''The Nation''.

★ Wrong Again - 2003 article about US policy on North Korea published in London Review of Books

★ "We look at it and see ourselves" - Review of two North Korea books, December 15, 2005. London Review of Books. (Accessed January 1, 2007).

★ Audio interview with Electric Politics June 16, 2006, 98 minutes.