About us

Kim studied philosophy and political science at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) and received his master's degree in 1991 from the Department of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the same university with a thesis on the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. In 1992, He became the first Korean to be admitted to the PhD program in Modern and Contemporary Hungarian History at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary. In October 1999, He received his Ph.D. in history with the highest honors (Summa Cum Laude) for his dissertation, “Great-Power-Policy and the Transylvanian Question during and after WWII”. Since the fall of 1999, He has taught at HUFS and other universities, and since 2007, He has worked as a historian for The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea (TRCK) for two years. He served as an academic researcher and a curator at The National Museum of Korean Contemporary History (MUCH). Since 2018, He has been a professor at the Korea Institute of Christianity Culture of Soongsil University, where he teaches and conducts research on topics related to Hungary, Eastern Europe, Asia and North Korea. In 2021, he received his second doctorate from the Department of North Korean Studies at Korea University, focusing on North Korea's foreign policy with east European countries. He has published numerous books and articles on Hungary, Eastern Europe, and North Korea. He was a managing editor of The Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies, The Journal of North Korean Studies and has been Editor-in-Chief of the Korean Journal of European Integration. He received twice the Award of Excellent Book of the Year from the National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea (NAS, 2023). He is member of the Korean Association of the Cold War Studies, the Korean Association of Western History and more.