2023 Speakers Series

Lee Talbot is Curator at The George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., where he specializes in East Asian textile history. Before joining the museum staff, he spent two and a half years as curator at the Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, Korea. He currently is preparing the exhibition Korean Fashion: From Royal Court to Runway, on view at The Textile Museum from August - December, 2022

Dr. Michael J. Devine served as the Director the Harry S. Truman Library from 2001-2014. During his 40 year career in the administration of public history institutions, he held positions as Director of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, Illinois State Historian and Director of the Illinois State Historical Society, and Assistant Director of the Ohio Historical Society. He has served as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer to Argentina (1983) and Korea (1995), and was the Haughton Freeman Professor of American History at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Graduate Center in Nanjing, China (1998-1999). In 2014 he was awarded the Robert Kelley Memorial Prize from the National Council on Public History for life-time achievement. He received his Ph.D. in U.S. Diplomatic History from Ohio State University in 1974

Dr. Gerry Krzic is President of Friends of Korea and the Director of the ESL and International Training & Development Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio University. Prior to joining Ohio University, he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea; a Fulbright Scholar in former Yugoslavia, and a university faculty member in Japan. He has taught intercultural communication and ESL, written numerous grants, and conducted workshops for professionals and students from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and South America. He has a Ph.D. in Intercultural Communication Studies and Master of Applied Linguistics/TEFL from Ohio University. He is also a Certified Trainer in Global Dexterity Methods. In 2014, he was awarded a Global Engagement Award by Ohio University for his exemplary service to international education.

Sooa Im McCormick is Curator of Korean Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She holds a PhD from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree from Rutgers University. After joining the Cleveland Museum of Art, she curated a number of special exhibitions including Playbook for Solitude (2021), Gold Needles: Korean Embroidery Arts (2020), and Chaekgeori: Pleasure of Possessions in Korean Painted Screens (2017). She is currently working on multiple curatorial projects including Persistence and Subversion in Korean Couture (2024) and Ten Kings of Hell and the Beyond (2026). While pursuing her curatorial career, Dr. McCormick remains active as a cutting-edge scholar who investigates the intersections between art, ecology, and politics. Her publications include “Re-Reading the Imagery of Tilling and Weaving of Eighteenth-Century Korean Genre Painting in the Context of the Little Ice Age,” in Anthology of Mountains and Rivers (without) End: Eco-Art History in Asia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019) and “The Politics of Frugality: Environmental Crisis and Eighteenth-Century Korean Visual Culture,” in Forces of Nature (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Amanda Thompson Rundahl joined the Saint Louis. Art Museum in 2014 as director of learning and engagement, overseeing the Museum’s education, art-interpretation and public-programming initiatives. She previous was  innovation engineer and head of interpretation and participatory experiences at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Rundahl graduated magna cum laude from Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. with majors in art history and Spanish. She received a graduate certificate in museum studies and a graduate degree in Latin American and Caribbean studies from New York University.