2024-2025 NextGen Scholars

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Carolyn Choi is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. Carolyn’s research focuses on how empire, gender, class, nation, and educational politics intersect and her current book project explores the stratified experiences of South Korean youth educational and labor mobilities across militarized, settler and intra-Asian contexts including the Philippines, Australia, the United States, and Saipan. Carolyn is a former Fulbright and Department of Education fellow and has published in the International Migration Review, Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Sexualities, Global Networks, positions: asia critique, AAPI Nexus Journal, and Social & Cultural Geography. Carolyn also writes children’s books on feminism and intersectionality and is co-author of Intersection Allies: We Make Room for All and Love Without Bounds: An Intersection Allies Book about Families. She obtained her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Southern California in 2021 and has held postdoctoral positions in Asian American Studies and Korean Studies at Dartmouth College and the University of California at Los Angeles, respectively.

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David Fields is the associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), the editor of The Diary of Syngman Rhee, (published by the Museum of Contemporary Korean History, 2015,) and Divided America, Divided Korea: The US and Korea During and After the Trump Years (Cambridge University Press, 2024). He has been published in the Washington Post, The National Interest, North Korea Review, Journal of American-East Asian Relations, SinoNK.com, NKnews.org, Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society-Korea Branch and in the Working Papers Series of the Cold War International History Project. His commentary and analysis have appeared on National Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Radio, C-SPAN, and CNN in addition to local radio and television. He earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2017. From 2016–2017 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

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Kristi Govella is an associate professor of politics and international relations in the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies and the School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford, where she is also a fellow of St. Antony’s College. Her research focuses on the intersection of economics, security, and governance in the Indo-Pacific region, including topics such as economic statecraft, government-business relations, regional institutional architecture, military alliances, and the governance of the global commons. She serves as an adjunct fellow at the East-West Center and Pacific Forum and as editor of the journal Asia Policy. Prior to joining Oxford, Dr. Govella was an assistant professor of Asian Studies and director of the Center for Indo-Pacific Affairs at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, senior fellow and deputy director of the Asia Program at The German Marshall Fund of the United States, postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and associate professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in Political Science and Japanese from the University of Washington, Seattle.

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James Dongjin Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. He previously was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program. His first book project shows that childhood exposure to war increases support for nuclear armament as an adult while decreasing willingness to use military force. Part of the book project won the 2024 Patricia Weitsman Award from the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) of the International Studies Association (ISA). My broader research interests include nuclear deterrence, the causes and consequences of diplomatic visits, and the role of leader backgrounds in alliances. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly. He has also written a policy analysis for NK News.  He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Texas A&M University, his M.A. in International Relations from Tsinghua University, China, and his B.A. in Political Science from Yonsei University, South Korea.

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Hannah Kim is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona. She is also an editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  Before joining Arizona, she taught at Macalester College. She works on aesthetics, metaphysics, and Asian philosophy, with particular interests in fiction, poetry, music, time, Confucianism, and Juche. Her writings have appeared in WIRED, LA Times, USA Today, Public Seminar, The Philosopher, and Aesthetics for Birds, among others. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Ph.D. minor in Comparative Literature from Stanford University.

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Donna Lee Kwon is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Music in Korea: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her research interests include North and South Korean music, East Asian and Asian American music, gender and the body, and issues of space and place. Many of these interests are addressed in her second book, entitled Stepping in the Madang: Sustaining Expressive Ecologies of Korean Drumming and Dance (forthcoming, Wesleyan University Press). She has also published in the Ethnomusicology, Music and Politics, and Ecomusicology Review journals. Donna has served in various roles in the Association for Korean Music Research, the Society for Ethnomusicology Council, the Board of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Ethnomusicology journal. As a new YouTuber, she also has a channel exploring Korean pop culture called Hallyu Like That!   She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (Ethnomusicology).

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So Jin Lee is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. She previously was a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow and a Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's International Security Program and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program. Her research focuses on questions related to economic statecraft, nuclear weapons, and interstate conflict with a regional focus on East Asia, specifically the Korean Peninsula. Her research has been supported by multiple grants and fellowships, including from the National Science Foundation, America in the World Consortium, and the Eurasia Group Foundation. 

She holds a B.A. in Politics from Mount Holyoke College, M.A. in Asian Studies from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University.

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Joseph Seeley is an Assistant Professor in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and specialist in the history of Korea, the Japanese Empire, and East Asian environmental history. His book Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan’s Empire in Korea and Manchuria (forthcoming October 2024, Cornell University Press) examines the Yalu River boundary between northern Korea and China during a period of Japanese expansion in the region. Drawing on previously unexamined sources in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, he argues that the seasonally freezing, thawing, and flooding river was a critical actor in imperial border creation and contestation. As part of his multilingual research on Korean history, Seeley has also published on topics such as U.S.-Korean diplomatic history, animal disease control in colonial Korea, Korean tiger-human relations, and the history of Japanese colonial zoos in Seoul and Taipei. At the moment he is currently working on a new book project surveying the environmental history of North Korea. Prior to joining the History faculty at UVA Seeley completed his doctoral studies at Stanford University, where his research was supported by the Korea Foundation and the Freeman Spogli Institute. Before Stanford he earned a bachelor’s degree in history with a minor in Korean from Brigham Young University.

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Ciara Sterbenz is a Rosenwald Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. She was previously a US-Asia Grand Strategy Predoctoral Fellow at The Korean Studies Institute at University of Southern California.  With a substantive focus on East Asia, Sterbenz's dissertation examines when and where leaders strategically pursue low-grade, aggressive foreign policy - short of outright conflict - for domestic ends, leveraging interstate rivalry to amplify perceptions of foreign threat, rile anti-foreign nationalism, and bolster regime support. In parallel, she also pursues research in political methodology, exploring the application of LLMs to text data, weighting methodologies for reducing bias in non-representative surveys, and approaches to causal inference with observational data. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and concurrently pursuing an Articulated Masters of Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned a BA in both Physics and Political Science at Columbia University.

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Soosun You is a Senior Fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and will join as an Assistant Professor in 2025. She was previously a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development and Research Fellow at the Human Trafficking Vulnerability Lab at UC Berkeley. Her work focuses on addressing various challenges to achieving gender equality. In her book project, she examines how the politics of the marriage market has shaped the feminist and antifeminist movements in South Korea, and East Asia more broadly. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods, she examines how the anti-natalist and pro-natalist government campaigns and policies have affected different dimensions of women’s empowerment. Her work has been supported by generous funding from the Academy of Korean Studies, the Northeast Asia Council, Korea Foundation, and the Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley. She is also a recipient of the 2024 Empirical Study of Gender Research Network (EGEN) Prize. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science, an MA in Political Science and BA in Economics from University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Public Policy from Seoul National University.