Category: Geopolitical Affairs

Edward J. Baker’s interest in Korea began with Peace Corps service, with his wife Diane, there in 1966-68. He has lived in Korea all together for about 10 years and has traveled widely in Asia. He has a BA from Colby College, a JD from Yale Law School and an MA in Regional Studies-East Asia from Harvard. He was a staff member of the Subcommittee on International Organizations (chair Donald M. Fraser, D MN) of the U.S. House of Representatives during its Investigation of Korean-American Relations in 1977-78 and one of the authors of its final report. He was the associate director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute for 25 years and taught East Asian and Korean history at Hanyang University and Seoul National University from 2007 through 2010.

Until the thorough democratization of the Republic of Korea marked by the December,1997 election of President Kim Dae Jung, he frequently wrote and spoke on South Korean political affairs. He was a founding member of the board of Asia Watch in 1985 (now Human Rights Watch—Asia) and was Amnesty International’s US South Korea coordinator from 1979-91. In recent years he has taken a strong interest in attempting to promote a peaceful solution to the confrontation between North Korea and the US/South Korea and the reunification of Korea.

Ingu Hwang received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Chicago in 2015. Currently, he is an associate professor of the Practice in the International Studies Program, an affiliated professor in the History Department and the Asian Studies Program. Prof. Hwang is also the Leader of the Global Korea Project at Boston College. He offers interdisciplinary courses on modern and contemporary Korea and East Asia that explore colonial/post-colonial experiences, division and geo-politics, the Korean War, development and social justice, human rights history in global contexts.  

His research centers on contemporary transnational and global Korean history with a focus on  the topics of democracy, peace, security, and human rights. His first book, Human Rights and  Transnational Democracy in South Korea, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press  Human Rights Series in 2022, offers the first account of the historical intersection between South Korea’s democratic transition and the global human rights boom in the 1970s and 1980s. Other publications include contributions to the Korea Democracy Foundation’s book, 1970s Korean Democratization and Protestants (Korean), published in 2024 and to the Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation’s Kim Dae-Jung’s Thoughts and Politics: Peace, Democracy, Reconciliation, and Cooperation (Korean), published in 2023. Currently, he is working on his second monograph, the first scholarly biography of Nobel Prize recipient Kim Dae-jung. The monograph utilizes a global political and cultural lens to analyze Kim’s engagements with Korean, regional, and international political discourses and policies from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Emma Chanlett-Avery is Deputy Director of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Washington, DC office and the Director for Political-Security Affairs. Previous to this post, she served for 20 years as a Specialist in Asian Affairs at the Congressional Research Service, where she focused on U.S. relations with Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Thailand, and Singapore, with an emphasis on security issues and alliances. In 2023, she served as a Congressional Fellow on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assisting the Chairman with drafting Asia policy legislation and preparing for hearings. Ms. Chanlett-Avery was a Presidential Management Fellow, with rotations in the State Department on the Korea Desk and at the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group in Bangkok, Thailand. She also worked in the Office of Policy Planning as a Harold Rosenthal Fellow. She is a member of the Mansfield Foundation U.S. – Japan Network for the Future and a Mansfield-Luce Asia Network Scholar. In 2016, she received the Kato Prize, awarded by Washington think tanks for strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance. She serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the National Association of Japan America Societies, Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Japan America Society of Washington DC, and as a Trustee of International Student Conferences, Inc. Ms. Chanlett-Avery received an MA in international security policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and her BA in Russian studies from Amherst College.

Joshua W. Walker, PhD became President & CEO of Japan Society in December 2019. Previously, he worked at Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political risk analysis firm, where he served as global head of strategic initiatives and Japan in the Office of the President. Prior to that, he was CEO and president of the USA Pavilion of the 2017 World Expo in Astana, Kazakhstan; founding dean of the APCO Institute; and senior vice president of global programs at APCO Worldwide, a leading global strategic communications firm based in Washington, D.C. Before joining the private sector, he worked in numerous roles at various U.S. government agencies, including the State Department and the Defense Department. He is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, and professor of Leadership and the American presidency at George Mason University and the Reagan Foundation. He was also Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and co-founded the Yale Journal of International Affairs. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Richmond, a master’s degree from Yale University, and a doctorate from Princeton University. Dr. Walker grew up in Japan where his parents still serve as missionaries, came to the United States when he was 18, and is bicultural and bilingual.