Sheena Chestnut Greitens

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT's Asia Policy Program and serves as editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review. Her research focuses on security, authoritarian politics and foreign policy, and East Asia.

Chestnut Greitens is currently on leave to serve as Visiting Associate Professor of Research in Indo-Pacific Security at the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. She is also a Nonresident Scholar with the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Her first book, Dictators and Their Secret Police (Cambridge, 2016), examined variations in internal security and repression in Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines during the Cold War, and won multiple academic awards. Her second book, Politics of the North Korean Diaspora (Cambridge, 2023), focused on authoritarianism, security, and diaspora politics. She is currently finishing her third book manuscript, which addresses how internal security concerns shape Chinese grand strategy.

Her research has been published in International Security, International Organization, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Governance, Asian Survey, China Quarterly, and the Journal of Korean Studies, as well as outlets such as Foreign Affairs and the New York Times. She has testified to Congress and regularly comments in national and international media outlets.

From 2015-2020, Chestnut Greitens was assistant professor of political science at the Univ. of Missouri, and founding co-director of MU's Institute for Korean Studies. In 2017-18, as First Lady of Missouri, she co-led the state's trade missions to South Korea and China, and ran an interagency policy initiative that delivered major legislative and executive-branch reforms to state policy on foster care, adoption, and prevention of child abuse/neglect. An advocate for women's leadership, she also worked to appoint women to statewide boards and commissions. She has been a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute.

Chestnut Greitens received her PhD from Harvard University; an MPhil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a B.A. with honors from Stanford University.