Minseon Ku

I'm a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Ohio State University, specializing in International Relations and Political Psychology. My dissertation on summitry and public opinion develops a theoretical approach to understanding summitry as a performance by foregrounding the audience dimension, focusing on audience reactions to the first summitry between former and current adversaries in three cases: the 1972 US-China summit, the 1983-4 South Korea-Japan summits, and the 2000 US-Vietnam. By bridging literature in critical security studies, sociology, social psychology and visual communication studies, I argue that summitry is a performance of impressions of world politics and states that is linked to the everyday security experience of lay people. My dissertation research is being generously supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Ohio State University (OSU) Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship, and the OSU Department of Political Science. 

 

My research related to summitry has been published in International Organization and the Hague Journal of Diplomacy. My research interests include IR theory, ontological (in)security, practice theory, public diplomacy, US and South Korea foreign policy, and East Asia International Relations. I have contributed policy commentaries on South Korea's foreign policy and diplomacy related to inter-Korea affairs, nuclear diplomacy, US foreign policy, and history disputes with Japan. 

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Before coming to OSU, I was a research assistant at the National Assembly Budget Office in Seoul, South Korea and a Korea Foundation junior residential fellow at the CSIS Office of the Korea Chair in Washington, D.C.