Director, Global Studies and Professor, Korean Studies
Akita International Univeristy

Email: ckquinones@msn.com

Security

Background

Dr. Quinones has lived and worked in South and North Korea,as well as Japan. As a U.S. diplomat, he witnessed South Korea's democratization during the 1980's and was directly involved in North Korea's opening to the outside world during the 1990s. He was the first U.S. diplomat to visit North Korea, was a member of the US negotiating team that resolved the first Korean nuclear crisis,and served as the State Department's liaison officer while living at the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center and in Pyongyang for 9 months in 1995 and 1996. After retiring from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1997, he arranged US-North Korea educational and agricultural exchanges for the Asia Foundation and Mercy Corps. Between 2001 and 2005, he concentrated on writing and commenting about US relations with Northeast Asia, particularly the Korean Peninsula. Since 2000, he has published three books: The North Korea Nuclear Crisis - Off the Record Memories, (translated into Korean and Japanese in 2000; Beyond Diplomacy: Implementation of the Agreed Frame Work(published in Japanese in 2003), and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding North Korea, published in English by Penguin Publishers' Alpha Books in 2004.

Biography

Dr. C. Kenneth Quinones is currently the Director of Global Studies and Professor of Korean Studies at Akita International University in Japan. He has been involved with Northeast Asia since 1962 as a soldier, scholar and diplomat. He was a foreign service officer from 1981 to 1997, serving in Washington, South Korea and Japan. He also served in the U.S. military for three years. He has taught at numerous institutions, including Trinity College in Hartford, Tufts University, and St. Michael's College and University of Vermont. He directed the Korean Peninsula program at International Action, and Mercy Corps' Northeast Asia Projects, and was The Asia Foundation's representative in Seoul. He holds a Ph.D from Harvard University in History and East Asia Language, an MA and BA from the University of Arizona in East Asian Studies and Political Science and attended the Defense Language Institute to study Korean. He is fluent in Korean

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