ANDI ZHOU

I am currently the Lightning Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House. My research examines the politics of interstate territorial conflict. Across the world, territorial disputes elicit intense public passions, even when the territory in question appears to hold little material value. Combining political science with insights from psychology and other disciplines, I seek to understand why people care about territorial disputes and what it takes to resolve such conflicts. Previously, I was an assistant professor of political science at the U.S. Naval Academy.

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I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. I am a recipient of Harvard's Ashford Fellowship and the Eisenhower Institute's Clifford Roberts Graduate Fellowship, and my work has been supported by Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation. Before entering academia, I was a program coordinator at the EastWest Institute facilitating unofficial ("Track 2") U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia diplomatic convenings. My op-eds on foreign policy have appeared in several outlets including The Diplomat and RealClearDefense. I have also worked at the U.S. Department of Labor in the Bureau of International Labor Affairs. I received a B.A. in Global Affairs from the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University and an MPA from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.