Emanuel Pastreich

Emanuel Pastreich is professor at Humanitas College at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea, and director of the Humanitas College Interdisciplinary Studies Program. Pastreich is co-director of the Global Convergence Forum and advisor to Gwangju Metropolitan City for international exchanges. He founded the Asia Institute which is dedicated to encouraging international cooperation in Asia.
Biography
Pastreich has written about globalization, the Internet, Taiwan Straits issues, Sino-American relations, the Korean Peninsula, and contemporary American politics for such journals as Japan Focus, Foreign Policy in Focus, the Asia Times, the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, and the Northeast Asia Peace and Security Daily Report of the Nautilus Institute. More recently, he has devoted much attention to technology policy, completing research projects with the Korea Research Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology, the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Materials, the Korea Institute for Nuclear Safety and the Korea Research Institute for Standards and Science.
Pastreich served previously as advisor to the Daedeok Innopolis research cluster, foreign relations adviser to the governor of Chungnam Province and the mayor of Daejeon Metropolitan City. Pastreich was co-founder of the Daejeon Environment Forum, now known as the Daejeon Green Growth Forum. This forum was the first effort to bring together representatives from Korean business, academics and government, to discuss environmental issues.
From 2005 to 2007, Pastreich worked in Washington, D.C. as adviser to the Ministers for Public Affairs at the Embassy of the Republic of Korea and as editor-in-chief of the daily on-line newspaper “Dynamic Korea”, published by the Korean Overseas Information Service.
Additionally, he served as director of a policy think tank, KORUS House, run by the Foreign Ministry. Pastreich was best known in that position for the lecture series he initiated on East Asian politics and business, known as the “KORUS Forum.”
Pastreich began teaching as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in 1997. He served as advisor for the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at University of Illinois.
Pastreich has written two books: The Novels of Park Jiwon: Translation of Overlooked Worlds and The Observable Mundane: Vernacular Chinese and the Emergence of a Literary Discourse on Popular Narrative in Edo Japan (both from Seoul National University Press).
Important articles by Pastreich include a proposal to rebuild Sichuan’s Wenchuan after the devastating earthquake as an ecocity, an article promoting Chinese cooperation in higher education with the other nations of East Asia and a discussion of US-China geopolitical relations arguing that analogies to the Cold War were inappropriate and greater cooperation was necessary.
Pastreich's original training was classical Chinese and Japanese literature. Pastreich has a B.A. degree from Yale University, a master’s degree from the University of Tokyo and a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Harvard University.

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