Name Charles Armstrong | ||
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Books Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 Education University of Chicago, Yonsei University, London School of Economics and Political Science, Yale University | ||
Charles King Armstrong is a historian and the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences at Columbia University, whose body of works in 2016-2017 became the center of controversy with other Korean studies scholars accusing him of source fabrication and plagiarism.
Contents
- Early life
- Career
- Controversy over Tyranny of the Weak
- Controversy over other works
- Editorship of the Journal of Korean Studies
- Selected works
- Honors
- References
His works deal with revolutions, Asia-Pacific wars, culture of socialism, architectural history, and diplomatic history in the contexts of East Asia, modern Korea, and North Korea.
Early life
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.
Career
Charles Armstrong is the 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 - 1992 (Cornell, 2013). He is currently writing a history of modern East Asia for the Wiley-Blackwell series "Concise History of the Modern World."
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.
Controversy over "Tyranny of the Weak"
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. The prize was returned by Armstrong in 2017 in response to critical queries made by the Association.
In 2016, the book was severely criticized by a number of North Korea scholars (Andrei Lankov, Balazs Szalontai, Brian Myers, Fyodor Tertitskiy and others) for its deceptive scholarship. Szalontai asserts that many parts of the text closely resemble text in Szalontai's Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era. Furthermore, the plagiarized texts were supported by documents that either do not exist or are completely unrelated to the subject. Szalontai has compiled a table of 76 problematic cases. Later he expanded the table to include 90 of such cases.
James Hoare, a former United Kingdom chargé d'affaires in Pyongyang, defended Armstrong with the arguments that these discrepancies could be honest mistakes.
Armstrong responded to NK News, a media site that specializes in North Korea, that he "did not comment on any specific issues critics have raised with the book". He later addressed the issues raised by the critics in his blog. Armstrong stated that he submitted 52 corrections to Tyranny of the Weak to the publisher Cornell University Press and these are to be included in the next printing of the book. In his later statement, he admitted that he had made "more than 70 corrections" of "the numerous citation errors" in the book.
A short review of the controversy was published in a collective blog Retraction Watch. It was also covered by South Korean and Chinese media.
Controversy over other works
In 2017, further allegations of academic deception were leveled against Armstrong's other works. In a piece for Daily NK, Fyodor Tertitskiy asserted that fabricated sources can also be found in Charles Armstrong's article "Fraternal Socialism" (published in 2005), Armstrong's article in the book "Korea at the Center" (2006) the latter co-authored), Armstrong's book "The Koreas" (2008) his working paper written for the US-Korea Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies (2008), and his article "North Korea and the Education of Desire" in the book called "Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship" which came out in 2016.
Tertitskiy's allegations were supported by Brian Myers. Myers also pointed out that six articles Armstrong contributed to journals and books consist up to between 30% and 90% of material that the author had already published.
Editorship of the Journal of Korean Studies
In autumn 2016, Charles Armstrong was appointed an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies published by Columbia University. However, as of February 2017, after the start of the controversy, he was no longer listed as Editor-in-Chief of the journal.
Selected works
Armstrong's published writings encompass 12 works in 35 publications in 2 languages.