Dr. Kongdan (Katy) Oh and Dr. Ralph Hassig talked about their newest book, "The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom" and did a book signing for Korea Club members at the Hunan Number One restaurant in Clarendon.

Kongdan (Katy) Oh is a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. She has written on a wide variety of topics in East Asian studies.

Katy was born in South Korea. She received her B.A. in Korean language and literature and Oriental history from Sogang University and an M.A. in Korean language and literature from Seoul National University. She came to the United States in 1979 and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Asian studies at Berkeley, becoming the first Berkeley student to receive a doctorate from the Asian studies program.

Before coming to the United States, she taught courses in Asian studies and East Asian politics for the University of Maryland University College in Korea. After receiving her Ph.D., she became the academic coordinator for Berkeley’s Center for Korean Studies, and lectured in the Graduate Program in Pacific Basin Studies at Dominican College. In 1986, she moved to RAND in Santa Monica, California, where she worked as a Political Scientist until 1995. She then came to Washington, where she did consulting work for government and private-sector clients, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Institute for Defense Analyses. In 1997 she joined the Institute for Defense Analyses as a Research Staff Member in the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division. Since coming to Washington, she has taught courses at the Elliott School of International Studies at George Washington University and the Graduate Program in International Commerce and Policy at George Mason University.

Katy is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and its Korea Task Force, the Korea Working Group of the United States Institute of Peace, and she is the co-founder and co-director of the Korea Club of Washington.

Ralph Hassig is a consultant and an adjunct professor of psychology in the undergraduate program of the University of Maryland University College, where his teaching fields are social and political psychology and consumer behavior. His major field of research is East Asia and Korea, with an emphasis on North Korea.

He attended Albion College in Michigan, where he received a B.A. in psychology. He went on to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. at UCLA, majoring in social psychology and minoring in personality psychology and sociology. He also earned an M.B.A. in marketing from the University of San Francisco.

He has taught psychology at Albion College, George Mason University, and the University of Maryland University College in the United States and abroad. He has also taught marketing at the University of Southern California and California State University at Los Angeles, and English at the University of San Francisco. With his wife, Katy Oh, he has been writing about North Korea since 1991.