Expertise

Since completing my PhD in Government at Cornell University in 2017, I have been post-doctoral research fellow in the department of political science at Lund University. I am also a member of the Stockholm Observatory for Global China at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs (Ui) and a consultant for the Norwegian Research Council funded Conceptual History of International Relations project at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). At Lund, I am affiliated with the STANCE research project on State-Making and the Origins of Global Order.

I am an expert on several “pain points” in China’s international affairs and have a knack for separating signal from noise. I have successfully conducted multi-year research projects on Tibet’s contested international status, China’s sovereignty claims in the South China Sea, the comparative quality of public health pandemic response in mainland China (PRC) and Taiwan (ROC) and the role of linguistic translation in shaping international politics.  This work has received multiple best-paper awards and been supported by funding from the US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program, the Einaudi Center for International Affairs, Cornell University, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (RBJ), Lund University and the Norwegian Research council.

My expertise and 11 years of research experience draw on rigorous academic, area studies and methodological training.

As a doctoral student at Cornell, I took courses in game theory, qualitative research methods, “mixed” political science research methods, political theory, international political economy, international theory, Asian security and classical (literary) Chinese.

I have also completed research methods training at Syracuse University’s Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR) and SUNY New Paltz. As a BA student, I studied statistics, combinatorics, advanced calculus, development economics and completed 2 courses of political science research methods. I have been studying Chinese politics and Mandarin Chinese since my first trip to China in 2006.

Most recently, my work as an academic researcher has relied on OCR text recognition and interpretation of late nineteenth/early twentieth century English and Chinese language international law textbooks, newspapers and thousands of diplomatic documents (many handwritten). My dissertation research entailed 15 months of fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), India, Taiwan (ROC) and the UK.

My article, “Tibet Lost in Translation: Sovereignty, Suzerainty and International Order Transformation, 1904-1906” published in the Journal of Contemporary China in 2017 is taught at global universities including the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the University of Delaware. It has also been cited by several other peer-reviewed papers.