Joan Cho

Joan Cho is an assistant professor of East Asian studies and an assistant professor, by courtesy, of government at Wesleyan University. She is also an associate-in-research of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and executive secretary and board member of the Association of Korean Political Studies. Authoritarianism, democratization, social movements, and authoritarian legacies in Korea and East Asia are her primary research and teaching focus. Dr. Cho’s research on authoritarian regime support, the South Korean democracy movement, and electoral accountability in post-transition South Korea are published in Electoral Studies, the Journal of East Asian Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, and the Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society. Her first book manuscript, Dictator’s Modernity Dilemma: Development and Democracy in South Korea, 1961-1987, examines the industrial and educational policies in South Korea during the authoritarian period. The manuscript shows how those policies initially helped bolster authoritarian rule, but, in the long run, facilitated mass-initiated democratic transition. Cho was selected as a 2018-2019 U.S.-Korea NextGen Scholar. She received her PhD and MA degrees in political science from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2016 and 2011 and BA (cum laude with honors) in political science from the University of Rochester in 2008. She previously held visiting fellow positions at the Asiatic Research Institute at Korea University, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, and the Center for International Studies at Seoul National University.