G. Cameron Hurst III - "I Did it My Way, Part II: Korea"

* Co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, the International Relations Program, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

G. Cameron Hurst III, Professor Emeritus of Japanese and Korean Studies, University of Pennsylvania

G. Cameron Hurst III is Professor Emeritus of Japanese and Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and former Director of the Center for East Asian Studies. He previously was Professor of History and East Asian Studies at the University of Kansas, whose faculty he joined in 1969. He served from 1976 to 1995 as Co-Director and then Director of that university's Center for East Asian Studies.

After completing his B.A. at Stanford in 1963, Hurst received his M.A. from the University of Hawaii in 1966 and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1972. In the course of his education, he spent three years in Japan, a year each at the Stanford Center and Keio University in Tokyo and a year at Kyoto University. He teaches primarily in pre-modern Japanese history, but occasionally in Korean studies as well.

Hurst is the author of Insei: Abdicated Sovereigns in the Politics of Late Heian Japan, 1086-1185, co-translator of Fukuzawa Yukichi's Outline of a Theory of Civilization, and co-author of Samurai Painters. He has contributed extensively to collected volumes, periodicals, and such newspapers as the Korea Times, the Japan Times, and the Asian Wall Street Journal. His most recent book is The Armed Martial Arts of Japan, the first volume in a two-volume work being published by Yale University Press.

Overseas teaching and administration have played a substantial role in Hurst's career: two years as Dean of the CUNY Lehman Hiroshima College (1990-92) were preceded by directorships at Doshisha University in Kyoto and Ewha Woman's University at Seoul, and by teaching positions in Seoul and, as Japan Foundation Professor, at the University of Hong Kong.