Sheena Chestnut Greitens is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is concurrently an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program. In 2023-24, she is on leave from UT to serve as visiting associate professor of research in Indo-Pacific security at the China Landpower Studies Center of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.

Dr. Chestnut Greitens’ research focuses on security, East Asia, and authoritarian politics and foreign policy. 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, 2023), addressed how authoritarian perceptions of security shape diaspora politics. She is currently finishing her third book manuscript, which analyzes how internal security concerns shape Chinese grand strategy.

Dr. Chestnut Greitens’ 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 has testified to Congress on challenges to security and democracy in the Indo-Pacific, and her commentary regularly appears in multiple media outlets.

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 was also previously 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 that resulted in major legislative and executive-branch reforms to Missouri’s policies 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.