The Asian Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service is delighted to welcome Yeonju Lee as the Korea Foundation-Song Family Assistant Professor in Korean Business and Economics. Dr. Lee will teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the political economy of Korea, post-developmental challenges in Japan and Korea, and economic inequality in Asia.
Dr. Lee is currently Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University in Japan. Her research and teaching interests include comparative political economy with a focus on the political and social origins and consequences of economic inequality and development in Korea and East Asia. She is revising her first book project, Judging Inequality, which explains how people define and judge economic inequality through the lens of sense of injustice and the mechanisms through which inequality judgment shapes the political arena, such as the politics of redistribution, political polarization, and democratic discontent.
Dr. Lee holds a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Korea University, an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where she was also affiliated with the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion. Her dissertation is the first non-economic dissertation to win the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group (HCEO) Dissertation Prize.