When Harrison Kim started working at MU in 2014, he and Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an assistant professor, immediately began talking about founding an institute to support and highlight the research MU faculty and students had already been doing about the Korean peninsula. Their idea came to fruition last month, with the creation of the MU Institute for Korean Studies.

“We realized that the University of Missouri has some really unique comparative advantages when it comes to Korean studies, and that goes all the way back to President Truman, the Korean War and President Truman’s legacy on campus,” IKS co-director Greitens said. “We have access to one of the best documentary collections on the Korean War anywhere in the world in the Truman Library, not too far away, and even some interesting collections in MU’s different libraries.”

MU has a long-standing relationship with Korea. At the urging of President Truman in the 1950s, a free-tuition program for Korean students began. Now, it’s one of MU’s oldest international relationships and one of the university’s largest international alumni chapters.

“MU, as a result, has a huge alumni community and affiliate network in Korea, and is really really well-regarded in Korea as being one of the great American public research universities,” Greitens said. “So we realized that we have these great and relatively unique resources and we thought it would be great to build on those.”