George Oakley Totten III
Areas of Interest:
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Politics; Comparative Politics and East
Asian Political Thought
Biography:
George O. Totten III is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of
Political Science and Director of the USC Korea Project. He has
authored, edited, contributed to, or translated twenty-five books (several
have been translated into
Chinese and/or Japanese and/or Korean) and has published over eighty articles. Dr.
Totten was Director of the USC East Asian Studies Center (1974-77);
first Director of the USC-UCLA Joint East Asian Language and Area
Studies Center (1976-77); and first Director of the Center for
Pacific Asia Studies, Stockholm University (1986-89). Dr. Totten is a
former Chair of the Department of Political Science (1980-86); in
1977 he was given an award by the Korean Consul General of Los Angeles for
promoting Korean studies at USC; he has served as Chairman of the
Mayor's Los Angeles-Pusan Sister City Committee, 1976-77; he was a co-founder
of the Los Angeles-Guangzhou Sister City Association in 1982 and remains
a member of its Board of Directors; and he helped found the Korean Heritage
Library at USC in 1986. He retired in 1992 after 27 years at USC and taught
for a semester at the University of Hawaii before joining the USC Center for
Multiethnic and Transnational
Studies as Senior Affiliated Scholar until its demise in 1997. He is Vice
President of the China Seminar, headed by his wife, Lilia Huiying Li, a Fellow
of USC's East Asian Studies Center. Its purpose is to promote peaceful
relations between Taiwan and mainland China. He was a nominator of
President Kim Dae Jung for a Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in December
2000. Competent in Japanese, Swedish, Chinese, French, and
German, he has also studied Latin, Malay, Russian, and Korean. He has a
special interest in the system each of the Asian languages has developed for
using Romanization and the advanatages of promoting their usage. From
before his military service in World War II, he has continued studying ways
of solving domestic and international problems by peaceful means, under the aegis
of domestic and international law.