Charles K. Armstrong

Charles King Armstrong is an academic, historian, and a Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences at Columbia University.

Armstrong earned B.A. at Yale University in 1984; and then he continued his studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, earning a diploma in Korean language in 1986. After receiving a M.Sc. at the London School of Economics in 1988, he was awarded a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1994.

Charles Armstrong is a Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History and the Director of The Center for Korean Research. A specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, Professor Armstrong has written or edited numerous books on modern and contemporary Korea, including The Koreas (Routledge, 2007),The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell, 2003), Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006), Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State (Routledge, Second Edition 2006), and Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950 - 1990 (Cornell, forthcoming 2012). He is currently writing a history of modern East Asia for the Wiley-Blackwell series "Concise History of the Modern World." Professor Armstrong is also a frequent commentator in the US and international media on Korean, East Asian, and Asian-American affairs.

He joined the Columbia faculty in 1996 and teaches courses on Korean history, U.S.-East Asian relations, the Vietnam War, and approaches to international and global history. He is a frequent commentator in the U.S. and foreign mass media on contemporary Korean, East Asian, and Asian-American affairs.

He was a Visiting Professor in 2008 at the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University.

In 2013 Charles Armstrong published a book named Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992 that deals with North Korean foreign policy in the 20th century. The book was the 2014 winner of the John K. Fairbank Prize, given to the best book in East Asian History by the American Historical Association.

In 2016, the book was criticized by various other North Korea scholars (Andrei Lankov, Balazs Szalontai, Brian Myers, Fyodor Tertitskiy etc.) for its incorrect references. As Szalontai asserts, many parts of the text closely resemble text in Szalontai's Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era and these texts are backed by documents that either do not exist at all, or are completely unrelated to the subject. He compiled a table of 76 problematic cases.

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