Donald N. Clark | Professor

Donald N. Clark was born in South America and educated in international schools in Colombia, Japan, and Korea. His B.A. is from Whitworth College and his M.A. and Ph.D. are from Harvard University. A short version of his doctoral dissertation appears in the Cambridge History of China.
He is co-author of two books on the history of Seoul city, editor of several volumes on Korea including one on the 1980 democracy uprising in Kwangju, and author of a book on Korean Christianity.

In connection with the Trinity University's capital campaign he was honored by a donor who endowed a chair in Chinese business to be called the Richard M. Burr and Donald N. Clark Chair in Business Administration. Burr and Clark together inspired the donor to launch what became a successful career in trade with China. The donor, who has asked to be anonymous, was one of the first Trinity studens to study abroad in the People's Republic of China, in the 1980s.

Publications

• Culture & Customs of Korea, Greenwood Press
• Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950, EastBridge
• Modern East Asia, co-author Conrad Schirokauer; Houghton-Mifflin

Don teaches courses on China, Japan, Korea, and U.S. Diplomatic History.  His research focuses on Korea, including where he has spent much of his life as the son of missionaries and also as a Peace Corps volunteer, Social Science Research Council fellow, and Fulbright exchange scholar, based at Yonsei University in Seoul.  In April 2007 he added a week’s experience in North Korea to the 12 plus years he has spent in South Korea between 1954 and the present.  His international experience also includes two voyages as a faculty member on the Semester at Sea program, a floating campus that takes takes a community of students and faculty studying and stopping at a series of ports around the world, taking courses for credit via the University of Virginia. 

He also serves as co-director of the new East Asian Studies at Trinity (“EAST”) program and manages EAST’s participation in the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, a Freeman Foundation-funded program under which he runs a seminar for San Antonio area teachers.  He is past chair of the Board of Directors of the ASIANetwork, a national consortium for liberal arts colleges with small Asian Studies program, and he serves as the book review editor for Korea for the Journal of Asian Studies. 

At Trinity Don serves on the International Studies Committee and advises the Korean Students Association (KSA).

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