Sheena Chestnut Greitens

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an associate professor at the LBJ School, as well as a faculty fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and a distinguished scholar with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law.

Her work focuses on East Asia, American national security and authoritarian politics and foreign policy. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an adjunct fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and a member of the Digital Freedom Forum at the Center for a New American Security.

From January 2015 to August 2020, Dr. 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 on China and North Korea has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes in English, Chinese and Korean, and in major media outlets. She has also previously testified to Congress on security issues in the Indo-Pacific. Her first book, Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (Cambridge, 2016) received the 2017 Best Book Award from both the International Studies Association and the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association.

In 2017–18, Dr. Greitens served as the first lady of Missouri, where she helped lead the state's 2017 trade mission to China and South Korea, and successfully advocated for major legislative and administrative reforms to Missouri's policies on foster care, adoption and child abuse prevention.

She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor's degree from Stanford University.