ONLINE: Understanding North Korea

media release: Continue the Badger tradition of lifelong learning, sifting, and winnowing by joining us for an enriching program with UW historian David Fields MA’09, PhD’17, associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies at UW–Madison. Fields, an expert in U.S.-Korean relations, will guide attendees through a historical exploration of the fundamental pillars of North Korean society in order to better understand news of the country today. Fields’s talk will be followed by a moderated Q & A session.

For more than 20 years, North Korea has defied predictions of its imminent collapse. Despite being an island of poverty in an otherwise developed corner of the globe, North Korea has remained surprisingly stable, successfully navigating two dynastic successions since 1994. Not only has the Kim regime persisted, but it has become ever more menacing through the development of indigenous nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. This lecture will examine how the North Korean regime uses ideology and underdevelopment to maintain itself in power and what implications North Korean stability has for U.S. policy toward the Korean Peninsula.

This is a free, virtual event. Please register for a link to access the live event, which will air on the Wisconsin Alumni Association YouTube channel. Questions? Please contact Lizzie Jorgensen at lizzie.jorgensen@supportuw.org or 608-572-2645.

About the speaker: 

David Fields is a leading expert in U.S.-Korean relations, U.S.-East Asian relations, and American foreign policy. He is the author of Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea and the editor of The Diary of Syngman Rhee, 1904–34, 1944, published by the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History. Since 2015, he has been the book review editor of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. He has been published in the Washington Post, the North Korea Review, the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, SinoNK.com, Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society-Korea Branch, and the Working Papers Series of the Cold War International History Project. His research and analysis have been featured on National Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Radio, C-SPAN, and CNN.