EA presents: Charles Armstrong

Charles Armstrong on Postmodern Pyongyang: North Korea's Transformations through its Changing Built Environment

Charles Armstrong, Columbia University

North Korea’s urban landscape has evolved in numerous ways in recent decades, despite the perception that the country is stuck in a Stalinist time-warp. Its architecture can be characterized as "socialist postmodernism." It is dictated by the directives of the central state, but is surprisingly resonant with both Western postmodernism and post-socialist trends in the former Soviet Union and China. Charles Armstrong will discuss Pyongyang’s built environment as a reflection of broader changes in North Korea’s culture and society. 

Professor Armstrong is the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences at Columbia University. His latest book, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950 – 1992 (Cornell University Press, 2013), won the American Historical Association John Fairbank Prize for East Asian History in 2014. 

Open to the Public

Sponsored by the Department of History and the East Asia Program at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs