About Me

Firstly, yes, I am the ‘BBC Dad‘ – the guy who got interrupted on BBC News by his kids in March 2017. Here is the video of that event; here and here are our family statements about it.

Otherwise, I am a professor of international relations in the Political Science and Diplomacy Department of Pusan National University in Busan, South Korea.

PhD, 2005:

• Political Science
  • International Relations
    • international security
    • international organization
  • Political Theory
• Ohio State University

Fellowships:

• Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies’ Teachers Workshop (Johns Hopkins)
• US-Korea NextGen Scholars Program (CSIS, USC, Korea Foundation)
• Summer Workshop on Military Operations & Strategy (Columbia)
• Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (Syracuse, APSA)
• Anti-Terrorism Academic Fellow (Foundation for the Defense of Democracies)
• Summer Workshop on Teaching about Terrorism (U. of Oklahoma, DHS)

Popular Publication Outlets:

• • 1945.com
  • Foreign Affairs
  • Duck of Minerva
  • The National Interest
  • The Diplomat
  • The Lowy Interpreter
  • Newsweek
  • CNN-GPS
  • JoongAng Daily
  • Dong-A Daily

Social Media:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Linked-In

Talks & Television Appearances:

• Presentations (I like this one)
• TV news appearances

My best topical & regional areas are:

• US Foreign Policy
• International Relations Theory
• East Asia
• Korea
• International Monetary Fund
• World Bank

In Busan, I teach US foreign policy, Globalization, Post-9/11 Security, basic IR theory, International Organization, and US politics.

My language training includes: German, French, Russian, Latin, Korean, classical Greek

I lived in Europe for 4 years. I have lived in Korea since summer 2008. I have traveled to about 40 different countries, including North Korea (impressions on that trip here and here).

My wife teaches yoga; we have a daughter and a son. My father is an excellent historian. My mother is a high school English teacher.

What else? In my other life, I would have been a screenwiter, a musician, or a classicist. I enjoy film a lot and write about it infrequently here. I also enjoy classical music very much (Austro-Germans mostly), and I read a lot of course. I find antiquity so fascinating that I took two extra years of grad school just to study Greek and Latin. Reading “Socrates’ Apology” in the original is one of the great achievements of my life. I run but am slow.

Thanks for coming to my site. I hope you like it.