Welcome! I am an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where I direct UT's Asia Policy Program and serve as editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review.  My research focuses on national and international security, authoritarian politics and foreign policy, and East Asia. 

I am 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 (China Landpower Studies Center). I am also a Nonresident Scholar with the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

My 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.  My second book, Politics of the North Korean Diaspora (Cambridge, 2023), focused on authoritarianism, security, and diaspora politics.  I am currently finishing a third book manuscript, which addresses  how internal security concerns shape Chinese grand strategy.  

My 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.  I have testified to Congress and regularly comment in national and international media outlets.

From 2015-2020, I was assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and founding co-director of MU's Institute for Korean Studies.  In 2017-18, as First Lady of Missouri, I 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, I also worked to appoint women to statewide boards and commissions. I have served as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute.

I received my PhD from Harvard University; an MPhil from Oxford University, where I studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a B.A. with honors from Stanford University.

You can follow my work @SheenaGreitens or @sheenagreitens.bsky.social.  My CV is here, and my Google Scholar page is here.

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Photo: View from Karakoram Highway, Xinjiang, China