Quincy Wright Book Award University of Chicago Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2003) Bruce Cumings (born September 5, 1943) is an American historian of East Asia, professor, lecturer and author.

In May 2007, Cumings was the first recipient of the Kim Dae-jung Academic Award for Outstanding Achievements and Scholarly Contributions to Democracy, Human Rights and Peace granted by South Korea.

[3] He was married to Meredith Jung-En Woo, the former president of Sweet Briar College and former Dean of Arts & Sciences at University of Virginia.

Cumings joined the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars at Columbia after Mark Selden formed a chapter there,[4] and published extensively in its journal, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, where his writings ranged from the early history of the Korean resistance movement against Japan to the intertwining of US academia with US intelligence agencies.

Blame enough to include a Soviet Union likewise unconcerned with Korea's ancient integrity and determined to "build socialism" whether Koreans wanted their kind of system or not.

And then, as we peer inside Korea to inquire about Korean actions that might have avoided national division and fratricidal conflict, we get a long list indeed.

[7] Cumings has not confined himself purely to the study of modern Korea but has written broadly about East Asia and even books about the expansion of the American West.

"[11] Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies scholar Kathryn Weathersby wrote that Cumings’ two-volume study of the origins of the Korean War was the "most important revisionist account" in which Cumings provides an interpretation of the war in which "the question remains open whether it was in fact the DPRK or the ROK that initiated the military action on 25 June 1950.

Stueck notes that Cumings published more than a generation after the start of the war and that his arguments "challenged the views that the war was largely international in nature and that the American participation in it was – with at least one prominent exception – defensive and wise.”[13] The historian Allan R. Millett argued that the work's "eagerness to cast American officials and policy in the worst possible light, however, often leads him to confuse chronological cause and effect and to leap to judgments that cannot be supported by the documentation he cites or ignores.