Shannon Boyd-Bailey McCune was an American geographer born in Sonchon, Korea on April 6, 1913. His parents, George Shannon McCune and Helen McAfee, were Presbyterian missionaries that had moved to Korea from the United States in 1905. McCune went to school in Korea before moving back to the United States. He received his bachelor's degree from the College of Wooster in 1935, his master's from Syracuse University and in 1939 he received a Ph.D. in geography from Clark University.

That same year McCune began teaching at Ohio State University. In 1946 he served with the Foreign Economic Administration in India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and China, where he won a Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1947 he became the chairman of the geography department at Colgate University, remaining in that post until 1955, at which point he left to become provost at the University of Massachusetts until 1961.

From 1961 to 1964, McCune left academia to serve as the first civilian civil administrator of Japan's Ryukyu Islands. In 1965 McCune returned to the United States where he was named president of the University of Vermont. He resigned from the position in 1966 to perform a research trip to Asia for the university. In 1967 McCune was named the educational consultant to a United Nations development mission in West Iran. He was subsequently appointed director of the American Geographical Society of New York and remained as such until 1969. In 1970 McCune returned to Okinawa on a research grant from the National Science Foundation. He taught as a professor of geography at the University of Florida in Gainesville until his retirement in 1979.

McCune was the author of a number of articles and monographs on Asian geography, as well as several books including "Korea’s Heritage, a Regional and Social Geography", "Korea: Land of Broken Calm", and "The Ryuku Islands".” He passed away on January 4, 1993 at the age of 79.