Back to the Future in a U.S. Satellite: Park Chung Hee and the May 16 (1961) Coup: A Genealogy

Back to the Future in a U.S. Satellite: Park Chung Hee and the May 16 (1961) Coup: A Genealogy

Carter Eckert - Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History, Harvard University

Thursday, December 12, 2019 - 4:30pm to 6:15pm
Auditorium, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511

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.


Carter J. Eckert was born in Chicago and trained in European ancient and medieval history at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, and also at Harvard. He developed a strong interest in Korea and East Asia as a result of his Peace Corps experience in Seoul in the late 1960s and 1970s. After several years of working and studying in Korea, he returned to the United States for doctoral study in Korean and Japanese history at the University of Washington, Seattle. Since 1985 he has been teaching modern Korean history at Harvard, including a popular undergraduate course called “The Two Koreas,” and working to build up the Harvard Korean studies program. In addition to developing the undergraduate Korean studies program, Eckert has also trained numerous graduate students, many of whom are now heading major Korean studies programs in North America and other parts of the world.

For eleven years, from 1993 to 2004, Eckert served as the director of the Korea Institute at Harvard and presided over a major financial and academic expansion that transformed the Institute into one of the Harvard’s most active and respected international studies centers.  In recognition of his scholarship and service, in July 2004 the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) appointed Eckert as the first Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History. As Yoon Se Young Professor and a continuing member of the Institute’s Executive Committee, Eckert has been actively engaged in enhancing the study of Korean history at Harvard, through the introduction of new courses and the promotion of dialogue and exchange with scholars working on Korean history throughout the world, including China, Japan, Europe, and, of course Korea itself.  Eckert is also committed to promoting undergraduate study abroad at Harvard and served as director of the Harvard Summer School’s Korea Program in 2007, as well as a chairman of Harvard’s Faculty Committee on Education Abroad.

Eckert is the author of Offspring of Empire: The Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism 1876-1945, winner of the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association, as well as the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.  He is also a co-author of Korea Old and New: A History, a widely-used university textbook on Korean history. He also co-edited a book on the economic development of the Republic of Korea with Professor Lee-Jay Cho of the University of Hawaii. In 1996-97 he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Currently he is engaged a study of Korean militarization and the rise of Korean militarism, including its connections with South Korean national “modernization” (kŭndaehwa) as conceived and carried out under the regime of late president Park Chung Hee. The first volume of this study, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism 1866-1945 was published by Harvard University Press in 2016. In recognition of this work, Eckert was designated a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow by Harvard University in 2017. 

Over the years Eckert has also been active in the larger field of Korean studies outside Harvard. As director of the Korea Institute, he played an important role in bringing international scholars in Korean studies to Harvard and in helping to promote Korean studies programs in other countries, including Europe and Latin America. He has served as chairman of the Committee on Korean Studies for the Association for Asian Studies and on many other boards and committees related to the promotion of scholarship on Korea and the enhancement of US.-Korean relations, including the Social Science Research Council, the Korea Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Asia Society, and the Korea Society. In 1998 he received an honorary appointment as Adjunct Professor of Yanji University of Science and Technology in China, and in 2004 he was appointed Honorary Distinguished Professor of Ewha University in Seoul. In 2004 the Korea Foundation also honored Eckert with a special award commemorating his years of service as director of the Korea Institute at Harvard.


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.

Region: 
Korea