Great news for all you Asian American studies scholars out there. The University of California, Riverside, is launching a Korean American studies center [1] with the help of a $2.7 million endowment from the Overseas Koreans Foundation.

It looks like the center is the one of first of its kind [2] at a major research university. That's no knock on California State University, Los Angeles, which has the long-established Center for Korean American and Korean Studies [3].

The UC Riverside center is being named for Young-Oak Kim [4], an Army vet who served in World War II and Korea. I'd not heard about him but he did a lot in the Korean American and Japanese American communities after retiring from the Army as a colonel. What a great way to honor him.

(Full disclosure: I work in the communications department for the systemwide headquarters of the University of California, and I'm not promoting UC here, just an interesting news item.)