Joon Nak Choi will be the 2015-16 Koret Fellow in the Korea Program at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), effective Jan. 1, 2016.

A sociologist by training, Choi is an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research and teaching areas include economic development, social networks, organizational theory, and global and transnational sociology, within the Korean context.

Choi, a Stanford graduate, has worked jointly with Stanford professor Gi-Wook Shin to analyze the transnational bridges linking Asia and the United States. The research project explores how economic development links to foreign skilled workers and diaspora communities.

Most recently, Choi coauthored Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea with Shin, who is also the director of the Korea Program. From 2010-11, Choi developed the manuscript while he was a postdoctoral fellow at Shorenstein APARC.

Mark Granovetter, a professor and chair of Stanford’s sociology department, praised Choi for his work in academia.

“Joon Nak’s dissertation on social influences on hedge fund managers’ success broke important ground in our understanding of financial markets. His recent book Global Talent sheds critical new light on the challenges of Korea and other economies facing high-level labor shortages, and the potential of foreign workers to meet them. As the 2015-16 Koret Fellow, he will bring his considerable talents to bear on the study of Korean society,” Granovetter said.

During his fellowship, Choi will study the challenges of diversity in South Korea and teach a class for Stanford students. Choi’s research will buttress efforts to understand the shifting social and economic patterns in Korea, a now democratic nation seeking to join the ranks of the world’s most advanced countries.

Supported by the Koret Foundation, the fellowship brings leading professionals to Stanford to conduct research on contemporary Korean affairs with the broad aim of strengthening ties between the United States and Korea. The fellowship has expanded its focus to include social, cultural and educational issues in Korea, and aims to identify young promising scholars working on these areas.

“It will be my pleasure and honor to spend the next year at Shorenstein APARC, and have the opportunity to engage in the vibrant research community there," Choi said.

Choi holds a bachelor’s degree in economics, international relations and urban studies from Brown University, and a master’s degree and doctorate in sociology from Stanford University.

For Matthew Kohrman and his students, the war against tobacco needs a new communications strategy.

After all, he noted, three times as many cigarettes are currently manufactured and sold worldwide than were in the 1960s. And the global cigarette industry is the greatest cause of preventable death on the planet today.

That’s why the Stanford associate professor of anthropology decided to teach an introductory seminar this spring, Anthro 182N, titled Smoke and Mirrors in Global Health. Kohrman led his 10 students on a journey into the “strange optics” that the global tobacco industry uses – and what to do about them.

As noted in the syllabus, “entrenched challenges” to global health require society to develop “new methods” to communicate the real truth about tobacco.

Just what are those “new methods?” At the culmination of the class, the students presented some variations on that theme. Their end-of-the-quarter projects were web-based efforts profiling various features of global tobacco. They included exposés on how academicians in China assist the industry in that country, humorous parodies and critiques of Philip Morris, and flawed approaches to tobacco control in South Korea.

They tackled big-picture questions, Kohrman said. For example, they asked what exactly constitutes cigarette manufacturing and how new strategies could help slow the spread of tobacco-related diseases worldwide.

Kohrman, the director of Stanford’s Cigarette Citadels project, envisioned his class as a way for students to offer some thought-provoking and original ideas grounded in solid data. After viewing the student projects, he was astounded – and proud.

“My overall impression has been a feeling of awe,” he said. “Mostly freshmen and sophomores, the students who enrolled in this new course quickly synthesized complex intellectual concepts introduced early in the quarter, conceived their own innovative project ideas, collected relevant data, generously worked with each other, designed apt strategies for evocatively visualizing their messages, and chose and implemented strong interactive media tools – most of which were utterly new to me.”

One of those students was Minkee Sohn, a communication major, who created a video, “Fresh Recruits,” to highlight what he believes is the hypocrisy in the language of some cigarette manufacturers’ recruitment efforts.

“While cigarette manufacturers,” Sohn said, “often frame smoking as an act of free choice, that choice is just an illusion. Free choice is denied to people in all stages of cigarette manufacturing and consumption.”

For example, he explained that children in the African country of Malawi are coerced to work with their families in tobacco fields. “It’s deeply disturbing to hear companies associate freedom with high-paying jobs in cigarette manufacturing.”

For biology major Annabel Chen, the most important thing she learned was to analyze information skeptically. “Industries like big tobacco have influences in unexpected places, so you always need to do sleuthing to find out the truth,” she said.

She chose to examine the links between tobacco and academic research in China. “Seeing as China is the biggest tobacco market in the world, this was a problem we needed to address.”

Kohrman appreciates how students like Sohn and Chen were willing to try an experimental course, never taught before, and which for many was outside of their comfort zone. He said the course will be taught again in 2015-16.

“Looking back, it was the perfect-size group for all the work and one-on-one teaching we did,” he said.

The course was a classic collaboration, according to Kohrman, who also credits Claudia Engel, a lecturer in the Anthropology Department who helped with the technology and his own experiences mentoring undergraduate research, all of which proved instrumental to designing Smoke and Mirrors in Global Health.

“It was a great success today,” he said after seeing the student projects on the last day of class. Tom Glynn, a top adviser to the American Cancer Society, was on hand to see the presentations.

Kohrman added, “Students got tremendous feedback, and there was lots of enthusiasm about how this experimental course unfolded.”

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

This year marks both the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the 14th year that U.S. troops have been engaged in conflict since 9/11. How have American writers portrayed the face of battle? What lessons have they learned from their writings about how humans remember or forget the past, and how do the controversies about these wars continue to haunt us still?

Courtesy Stanford Live

Poet Natasha Trethewey will read from her Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard as part of the Writing About War program.

On Tuesday, June 30, award-winning authors Natasha Trethewey and Phil Klay – both known for their acclaimed war-related works – will explore these topics in an evening of readings and conversation. The free program, titled Writing About War, is co-presented by Stanford Live and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford, and is part of a workshop on New Dilemmas of Ethics, Technology and War sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Writing About War begins at 6 p.m. in Bing Concert Hall, with opening remarks by Jonathan Fanton, president of the Academy.

"One of the traditions of the American Academy, from its earliest days in the 18th century, is to bring together scientists, social scientists and humanists to address pressing issues of national importance," says Stanford political science Professor Scott Sagan, a senior fellow at CISAC and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Sagan will moderate the discussion.

"Political scientists and historians often study how the evolution of military technology influences politicians and generals who decide to go to war," Sagan adds. "But it is the novelists, the poets and the short story writers whose work helps us better understand how changes in military technology influence the soldiers and the noncombatants on the battlefield and after wars end."

Courtesy Stanford Live

Veteran Phil Klay will read from his short story collection Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction, at the event.

Klay, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who Sagan calls "a remarkable new voice in American literature," will read from his 2014 National Book Award-winning Redeployment, a collection of short stories that portray war and its aftermath through the memories of ordinary soldiers and officers fighting in Iraq. The characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos in tales interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival.

Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, Confederate Memorial Day, Trethewey could hardly have escaped learning about what the American Civil War represented. The 19th U.S. Poet Laureate will read from her 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Native Guard, which was inspired by a real diary of a Union Army officer. Trethewey's "haunting poems about the experiences of black Union soldiers," Sagan describes, "open our eyes to an important part of our nation's history that is too often forgotten."

The event on June 30 also speaks to the larger idea of using art to communicate veterans' trauma, loss and healing – one of the core themes that will be explored through Live Context: Art + Ideas during Stanford Live's 2015-16 season.

"As America's foreign military involvements stretch on seemingly without end, our country's returning veterans are in our consciousness more and more, as they are for the artists with whom Stanford Live has relationships," says Wiley Hausam, executive director of Stanford Live. "The War: Return and Recovery theme emerged from this convergence."

It's a theme that will be anchored by two new works planned by Hausam: the concert premiere of Stanford faculty composer Jonathan Berger's My Lai on Oct. 10, based on the tragic 1968 massacre during the Vietnam War; and a dance creation by choreographer Joe Goode titled to go again for the Oakland-based AXIS Dance Company on April 23, featuring the stories of several American veterans who have recently returned home from war told through a combination of movement, music and text. Additional related events will be announced in the fall.

Writing About War is free and open to the public. For more information or to make advance reservations, visit Stanford Live online.