Core Faculty

Leadership

portrait of Jisoo Kim in professional attire

Jisoo M. Kim | Director

jsk10@gwu.edu

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017-Present) and Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-Present). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Criminalizing Intimacy: Marriage, Concubinage, and Adultery Law in Korea, 1469-2015. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

portrait of Gregg Brazinsky in professional attire

Gregg A. Brazinsky | Deputy Director

brazinsk@gwu.edu

Gregg A. Brazinsky is Professor of History and International Affairs and Deputy Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. His research seeks to understand the diverse and multi-faceted interactions among East Asian states and between Asia and the United States. He is the author of Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). He served as Interim Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies during the Spring 2017 semester.

portrait of Yonho Kim in professional attire

Yonho Kim | Associate Director

yhkim@gwu.edu

Yonho Kim is an Associate Research Professor of Practice and the Associate Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. He specializes in North Korea’s mobile telecommunications and U.S. policy towards North Korea. His research focuses on North Korea’s cell phone usage, mobile money transfers, private transportation services, marketization, information control and circulation, and changing media environment. He is also interested in US domestic politics and the Korean peninsula, US-ROK relations, and nuclear negotiations with North Korea.

Kim is the author of North Korean Phone Money: Airtime Transfers as a Precursor to Mobile Payment System (2020), North Korea’s Mobile Telecommunications and Private Transportation Services in the Kim Jong-un Era (2019), Normalizing U.S.-North Korea Economic Relations: An American View (2019), Science and Politics of Satellite Imagery Analyses of North Korea (2018), Foreign Media into North Korea: Finding Synergy between Pop Culture and Tailored Content (2016), and Cell Phones in North Korea: Has North Korea Entered the Telecommunications Revolution? (2014). His research findings were covered by various media outlets, including Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Yonhap News, and Libération.

Kim has extensively interacted with the Washington policy circle on the Korean peninsula at Washington think tanks and media outlets in the past 20 years. Prior to joining GWIKS, he was Senior Researcher and the editor of the USKI Washington Review of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. From 2008 to 2015, he was Senior Reporter for Voice of America’s Korean Service where he received a “Superior Accomplishment Award,” from the East Asia Pacific Division Director of the VOA. From 2003 to 2008, he was a broadcaster for Radio Free Asia’s Korean Service. From 2001 to 2003, he was the Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council’s Program on Korea in Transition where he conducted in-depth research on South Korean domestic politics and oversaw program outreach to US government and media interested in foreign policy.

He holds a B.A. and M.A. in International Relations from Seoul National University, and an M.A. in International Relations and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Young-Key Kim-Renaud smiling for photo with cityscape in the background

Young-Key Kim-Renaud | Senior Advisor

kimrenau@gwu.edu

Young-Key Kim-Renaud is Professor Emeritus of Korean Language and Culture and International Affairs, and Senior Advisor to the Institute for Korean Studies at George Washington University. She taught at GW for 32 years and served as Chair of the East Asian Languages and Literatures Department for the last 12 years of her tenure before retiring in 2015. She has published 13 books and numerous articles on Korean language/linguistics and Korean culture, history, and literature. She was President of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics (1990-1992) and Editor-in-Chief of its journal, Korean Linguistics (2002-14). Organizer of major cultural and academic events, she is the recipient of prestigious grants and prizes including three Fulbright awards, the Republic of Korea Order of Cultural Merit, and the Samsung Bichumi (Women of the Year) Award in Korea. She currently serves as President of the Korean Literary Society of Washington.  (See her most recent CV)

Core Faculty

portrait of Celeste Arrington with arms crossed

Celeste Arrington | Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

cla@gwu.edu

Celeste Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at GW. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research and teaching focus on law and social movements, the media, lawyers, policy processes, historical justice, North Korean human rights, and qualitative methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism. She is the author of Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (2016) and has published in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, and the Washington Post, among others. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. from Princeton University. She is currently writing a book that analyzes the role of lawyers and legal activism in Japanese and Korean policies related to persons with disabilities and tobacco control.

portrait of Immanuel Kim with blurry background

Immanuel Kim | Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies

ikim52@gwu.edu

Immanuel Kim is Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Prior to working at the George Washington University, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). His first book, Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction (2018), examines North Korean literature, and his second book, Laughing North Koreans (2020), looks at North Korean comedy films. He also translated a novel from North Korea called Friend (2020).

Insung Ko posing for photo on a sunny day outside

Insung Ko | Teaching Assistant Professor in Korean Language

insungko@gwu.edu

Insung Ko is Teaching Assistant Professor in Korean Language in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the George Washington University. He used to teach Korean language at various levels at Washington University in St. Louis, Middlebury School of Korean, and University of Michigan. His research interests are in Korean linguistics, second language phonetics, second language pedagogy, and language testing.

selfie of Miok Pak in her office

Miok D. Pak | Assistant Professor of Korean Linguistics and Language

pakm@gwu.edu

Miok D. Pak is Assistant Professor of Korean Linguistics and Language in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She received her PhD in theoretical linguistics from Georgetown University. Her research covers a wide variety of topics in syntax, semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces as well as pedagogy. She has recently published a book entitled The Routledge Courses in Business Korean (with Young-Key Kim-Renaud, Routledge 2019) and has a number of publications in major linguistics journals on the topics of clause types, interpretation of the subject in jussive clause types, speaker and addressee in syntax and semantics (in joint with Paul Portner and Raffaella Zanuttini) and agreement in Korean. Her most recent research is on honorifics and politeness and their grammatical change, and she is currently working on new book projects on the topics of Honorifics and Politeness in Korean, Composition in Korean, and Korean Linguistics.

portrait of Roy Richard Grinker in professional attire

Roy Richard Grinker | Professor of Anthropology, International Affairs, and Human Sciences

rgrink@gwu.edu | Website

Roy Richard Grinker is Professor of Anthropology, International Affairs, and Human Sciences at the George Washington University. He is a cultural anthropologist specializing in ethnicity, nationalism, and psychological anthropology, with topical expertise in autism, Korea, and sub-Saharan Africa. He has conducted research on a variety of subjects: ethnic relationships between farmers and foragers in the Ituri forest, Democratic Republic of Congo; North and South Korean relations, with special emphasis on North Korean defectors’ adaptation to South Korea life; and the epidemiology of autism. In addition, he has written a biography of the anthropologist Colin M. Turnbull and his new book Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (W.W. Norton). He was Interim Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies for the Fall 2016 semester.