Kenneth Swope
Kenneth Swope is Professor of Strategy & Policy at the United States Naval War College as well as Professor of History and Senior Fellow of the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of several books and articles on East Asian military history, international relations and grand strategy and is currently writing a book on the Three Feudatories Rebellion.
Kizaki Braddick graduated from the Australian National University in Asia-Pacific Studies (2015). This was followed by an MA in Japanese Studies from Leiden University (2018). He recently completed a DPhil in Oriental Studies at Oxford University (2025) with a dissertation on ‘The Grand Strategy of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1582-1598: Peace Through Hegemony’.
Sangwoo HAN received his Ph.D. in East Asian Studies (Chosŏn History) from Sungkyunkwan University. He served as a postdoctoral researcher with the university’s Chosŏn Household Register Digitization Project, as well as on the ERC project at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of History at Ajou University. His research explores Korean society, population, and family within the broader East Asian context.
Byung-Ho LEE is Associate Professor of Sociology at Ajou University, South Korea. He received his MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan and was a Lecturer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research spans the fields of sinology, comparative and historical sociology, and demography, with a focus on ethnicity, identity, and social policy.
United States Naval War College
Session
The Imjin War, also known as “The Japanese Calamity of 1592,” “The Rescue of Korea,” “The Glorious Conquest of Korea,” or “The East Asian War,” was the largest military conflict of the sixteenth-century in terms of the number of combatants, yet it still remains obscure outside of East Asia. This is despite the fact that the war was witnessed and chronicled by Western observers and its outcome had significant and far-reaching implications for the subsequent histories of all the major belligerents and indeed, for international trade in the region. It marked the most serious challenge to China’s international hegemony in East Asia prior to the nineteenth century and featured the integration and deployment of the latest military technologies from both the West and the belligerent states. Its memory continues to impact relations between China, Korea, and Japan in both the cultural and diplomatic realms. Bringing in primary sources from all the major participants and examining the impact of this war down to the present, the papers in this panel seek to redress this omission by focusing on several key facets of this seminal conflict, ranging from strategy and alliance building, to the production and dissemination of nautical knowledge, to the creation of extensive genealogies to document positive participation in saving the Korean state from destruction at the hands of the Japanese invaders. Together, the papers demonstrate the permeability of borders and boundaries of various kinds, helping to highlight the broader global significance of this war and suggests fruitful areas for future comparative research.