Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Visiting Associate Professor
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is Visiting Associate Professor of Research in Indo-Pacific Security with the China Landpower Studies Center of the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. She is also an associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program.
Dr. Chestnut Greitens' research focuses on security, East Asia, and authoritarian politics & foreign policy, particularly in China and Korea. Her first book, Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (Cambridge, 2016) received multiple academic awards. Her second book, Politics of the North Korean Diaspora (Cambridge: Elements Series in East Asia, 2023), addresses how authoritarian perceptions of security shape diaspora politics. She is currently finishing her third book manuscript, which examines how internal security considerations shape Chinese grand strategy.
Her work has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes in English, Chinese, and Korean, and in major media outlets. 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 Foreign Affairs and the New York Times, among others. She regularly testifies to Congress on challenges to security and democracy in the Indo-Pacific.
From 2015-2020, Chestnut Greitens was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri and founding co-director of MU's Institute for Korean Studies. She has also been a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Korea Chair, and the American Enterprise Institute. In 2017-18, as First Lady of Missouri, Chestnut Greitens co-led the state's trade missions to China and South Korea, and ran an interagency policy initiative on foster care, adoption, and prevention of child abuse and neglect. An advocate for women's leadership in public policy, she also worked to appoint women to statewide boards and commissions.
She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor's degree from Stanford University.