Early life[edit]
Armstrong earned his B.A. in Chinese Studies (having transferred from East Asian studies during his first year) at Yale University in 1984, and continued his studies for two years at Yonsei University in Seoul, earning a diploma in Korean language in 1986. He next spent a year in Northeast China teaching English at Jilin University and then went onto study for an M.Sc. at the London School of Economics in 1988. He earned his Ph.D. in Korean Studies at the University of Chicago in 1994 under Bruce Cumings, a noted historian of Korean Studies.[2]
Career[edit]
Charles Armstrong is a specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, and has written or edited numerous books on modern and contemporary Korea as well as the wider East Asia region (including Vietnam and Japan) and the Cold War.
He joined the Columbia faculty in 1996 and before leaving in 2020, taught courses on Korean history, U.S.-East Asian relations, the Vietnam War, and approaches to international and global history.
His book The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950, published in 2003, was based largely on captured North Korean documents in the U.S. National Archives, and was a step forward for efforts to understand North Korea more at the local level and beyond more conventional Cold War or Korean War-centered approaches.[3] He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals on such subjects as Kim Il Sung's Manchurian guerrilla heritage,[4] the "cultural Cold War" in Korea,[5] and assessments of North Korean studies as a whole.[6]
He was a visiting professor in 2008 at the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University, has given keynote lectures at major Asian studies conferences,[7] and is a regular fixture in US media coverage of the Korean peninsula, including documentary film and television.[8][9]
Sexual assault accusation[edit]
A female student enrolled in Armstrong's 2014 Global Scholars summer course accused Armstrong of rape in 2020.[37][1] According to the university's student newspaper Columbia Spectator, Armstrong responded that the sex was consensual.[37] Columbia University's Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action conducted an internal investigation of the accusation and found Armstrong guilty of harassment and of violating the university policy prohibiting relationships between professors and students.