Introduction
I concentrated in East Asian Studies as an undergraduate at Harvard College (1989-1993), and then spent two years in Japan as a Rotary Scholar before returning to Harvard for my doctoral studies in political science (1995-2001). During my graduate studies I spent a year abroad as a Fulbright scholar with time in Tokyo and Brussels for research on the politics of agricultural trade negotiations. I taught international relations at Princeton University for sixteen years with a joint appointment as a professor in the Department of Politics and in the School for Public and International Affairs. I returned to Harvard in 2018 where I am now the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics and Director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. For the year 2024-25, I will serve as the Centenary PPE Professor at Oxford.
Teaching
At Harvard, I have taught seminars at the graduate and undergraduate level on international organizations. We explore theoretical perspectives on the conditions that support cooperation and consider specific topics such as trade policy, environmental protection, and collective security. I also teach an undergraduate course, “Law, Politics, and Trade Policy: Lessons From East Asia.” Students examine the transformative role of trade policy for Japan, Korea, and China that produced the East Asian growth miracle and generated trade conflict.
Research
My research examines topics related to trade, East Asian foreign policy, and international organizations. My dissertation research was published in 2003 as a book titled Food Fights over Free Trade: How International Institutions Promote Agricultural Trade Liberalization. My research continued to explore cooperation in trade policy with articles on economic and security linkage in negotiations and a book Why Adjudicate? Enforcing Trade Rules in the WTO (Princeton University Press 2012), which examines the domestic pressures that shape international trade disputes. My most recent book, Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations, was published by Princeton University Press in 2023. The book reveals the discriminatory logic at the heart of multilateral institutions. With statistical analysis of membership patterns and historical case studies, I show how geopolitical alignment determines who gets into the room to make the rules of global governance. This year I am conducting research for a new book about how international rivalry shapes trade policy and writing several articles on economic sanctions.
Publications
A list of my publications can be found here