Race and Social Exclusion in a Global Context: Perspectives from the US and Korea
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About the Guest Speakers
Gen. Vincent K. Brooks
Vincent K. Brooks is a career Army officer who retired from active duty in January 2019 as the four-star general in command of over 650,000 Koreans and Americans under arms.
General Brooks, who goes by “Vince,” is a 1980 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the first class to include women, and he led the 4,000 cadets as the cadet brigade commander or “First Captain.” A history-maker, Brooks is the first African American to have been chosen for this paramount position, and he was the first cadet to lead the student body when women were in all four classes (freshman or “plebe” to senior or “first classman”). He is also the eighth African American in history to attain the military’s top rank – four-star general in the United States Army.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; a Master of Military Art and Science from the prestigious U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; was a National Security Fellow at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government; and also holds an honorary Doctor of Laws from the New England School of Law as well as an honorary Doctor of Humanities from New England Law | Boston.
Widely respected as a speaker and leader of cohesive, innovative organizations, within and beyond the military, his areas of expertise are: leadership in complex organizations, crisis leadership, and building cohesive trust-based teams, national security, policy, strategy, international relations, military operations, combating terrorism and countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, diversity and inclusion. He is a combat veteran and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In retirement, General Brooks is a Director of the Gary Sinise Foundation; a visiting Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs; a Distinguished Fellow at the University of Texas, with both the Clements Center for National Security and also the Strauss Center for International Security and Law; an Executive Fellow with the Institute for Defense and Business; and the President of VKB Solutions LLC.
Vince is from a career military family and claims Alexandria, Virginia as home given the long roots in maternal and paternal branches of the family tree. Vince is married to Carol P. Brooks, MA, DSc. a retired Physical Therapist and currently an adult Educator. The two reside in Austin, Texas.
Nemo Kim
Nemo Kim is a journalist based in Seoul who writes on the two Koreas for The Guardian and Billboard. She has also reported on the Korean Peninsula and related issues for BBC World TV, BBC World Service, Variety, Nikkei Asian Review and CNN.com. Prior to this, she served as Seoul Business Correspondent at NHK World of Japan. Ms. Kim previously anchored a daily news program at KBS World which was broadcast in over 100 countries. Before that she served as a news producer at KBS London Bureau.
Ms. Kim began teaching in the East Asian Department at SOAS (the University of London) in 1995 and went on to teach Korean Politics and Diplomacy, Social Issues in Korea and Korean Popular Culture at Korea University, Soonchunhyang University and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. She also designed and currently teaches a course in Screen Translation at the Literature Translation Institute, part of South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
Ms. Kim received a BA in English Literature with Drama and an MA in Comparative Literature (with a focus on Chinese and Japanese Literature and Translation Studies) from the University of London. She has an MSt in International Relations from the University of Cambridge. Ms. Kim speaks French and German.
Mitchell R. Moss
Mitchell Moss leads the Public Diplomacy section in Embassy Seoul in planning and executing our strategic communications and outreach efforts. Prior to this assignment, he directed the Office of Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which provides intelligence analysis to senior policymakers on the global proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, strategic nuclear forces and conventional military forces and weapons systems.
Mr. Moss previously served as Deputy Director in INR’s Office of Intelligence Operations and Oversight, charged with supporting relations with the intelligence community regarding operations, human intelligence requirements, and the promotion of global diplomatic reporting. Mr. Moss’ prior overseas service includes Public Affairs Counselor in Islamabad, Press Counselor/Spokesperson in Paris and Berlin, and Deputy PAO in Kabul. Mr. Moss also previously served in Nigeria, Argentina, and Malawi.
Mr. Moss obtained an M.S. in National Security and Resource Strategy (with a focus on military aviation) from the Dwight D. Eisenhower School at National Defense University, an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Iowa, a J.D. from Tulane University, and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Loyola University, New Orleans. He speaks French, German and Spanish.
Angela Naimou
Angela Naimou is an associate professor at Clemson University. She teaches and writes about contemporary literature and its capacious engagements with law, empire, the state, race, and migration. She is the author of Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (2015), which won the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize and received Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Award. She is at work on two projects. One is a book about contemporary literature and international border regimes. It brings English, Spanish, and Arabic languages and literary forms together to examine literary and activist conceptions of futurity in the global migration order, especially as it involves militarized borders and resource extraction as well as refuge, asylum, detention, and deportation. Naimou is also working on Diaspora and Literary Studies, a critical volume to be published as part of Cambridge UP’s Critical Concepts Series.
Naimou co-edits Humanity journal, a multidisciplinary and international journal of human rights, humanitarianism, and development (U Penn). The statement by the editorial collective can be found here. She also serves as Associate Editor of the journal Contemporary Literature (U Wisconsin).
Naimou received her Ph.D. of English from Cornell University.
About the Moderator
Mason Richey
Mason Richey is a senior contributing writer to Asia Society Korea and an associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (Seoul, South Korea). Dr. Richey has also held positions as a POSCO Visiting Research Fellow at the East-West Center (Honolulu, HI) and a DAAD Scholar at the University of Potsdam. His research focuses on U.S. and European foreign and security policy as applied to the Asia-Pacific. Recent scholarly articles have appeared (inter alia) in Pacific Review, Asian Security, Global Governance, and Foreign Policy Analysis. Shorter analyses and opinion pieces have been published in War on the Rocks, Le Monde, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and Forbes, among other venues.
Dr. Richey received his Ph.D. from Binghamton University, New York.