B.R. Myers, a professor of North Korean literature at South Korea's Dongseo University draws from decades of research in North Korea's ideology and propaganda to disprove the common fallacy that the DPRK is a "last bastion of Stalinism." In his latest monograph The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters Myers argues that the Kim Jong Il regime is instead guided by a paranoid, race-based nationalism with roots in Japanese fascism.

Joining Myers at a Wilson Center discussion of The Cleanest Race will be Kirk W. Larsen, an associate professor of Korean history at Brigham Young University and author of Tradition, Treaties, and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Choson Korea, 1850-1910 (Harvard, 2008).

B.R. Myers is an American-born, German-educated scholar currently teaching North Korean literature at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. He is the author of Han Sorya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK (Cornell, 1994) and A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose (Melville House, 2002). He is also a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly, and a frequent contributor to both NPR and The New York Times. He received his PhD from the University of Tubingen in Germany.

Kirk W. Larsen is an associate professor of Korean history at Brigham Young University and author of Tradition, Treaties, and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Choson Korea, 1850-1910 (Harvard, 2008). He was formerly the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at the George Washington University and director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. His research interests include the history of Korea, contemporary Korean domestic politics, East Asian foreign relations, and imperialism. Larsen received his PhD from Harvard University.