August 17, 2006
Memorial Friday, Sept. 8, for James Palais
James Palais, considered a key figure in establishing the Korean studies field in the United States, will be honored at a memorial service from 3 to 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 8, in Room A102 of the Physics-Astronomy Auditorium building. A reception will follow.
Palais died Aug. 6 at the age of 72. He was a professor emeritus with the UW’s Jackson School of International Studies and the Department of History and he continued to teach part time, write and edit after his retirement from the UW in 2001.
Palais’ arrival at the UW in 1968 made the UW program the largest Korean studies program in North America.
He’s credited with training many of the world’s top Korean scholars as well as writing and editing key books and journals. Among his best-known books is the 1,230-page Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions, a work covering 500 years of Korean history. The book earned the John Whitney Hall book prize as the best book on Japan or Korea in 1998 from the Association for Asian Studies.
Born in Brookline, Mass., in 1934, he graduated from Harvard University in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in American history. He joined the Army and learned Korean at the Army language school in Monterey, Calif. He went on to earn his master’s from Yale in 1960 and his doctorate from Harvard in 1967. He taught at Norfolk State College in Virginia and at the University of Maine before joining the UW.
He is survived by his wife, Jane, and two children.
For more information on the memorial, contact Young Sook Lim, Korea Studies outreach coordinator, Jackson School of International Studies, 206-543-4873, yslim@u.washington.edu.
