Greitens - headshot (2023)

Sheena Chestnut Greitens

Founding Director | Asia Policy Program

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an Associate Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program. Her work focuses on East Asia, authoritarian politics, and national security.  She is on leave in 2023-24 to serve as Visiting Research Professor of Indo-Pacific Security at the U.S. Army War College, and is also a Jeane Kirkpatrick fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.  From 2015 to 2020, Chestnut Greitens was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and co-director of the University’s Institute for Korean Studies. Her work has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes in English, Chinese, and Korean, and in major media outlets, and she regularly testifies to Congress on challenges to security and democracy in Asia.  Her first book, Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence received the 2017 Best Book Award from both the International Studies Association and the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association. She is currently working on her third book project, on internal security and Chinese grand strategy. She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor’s from Stanford University.