Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) invites applications for several fellowships in contemporary Asia studies beginning in fall quarter 2027.

APARC offers a postdoctoral fellowship on contemporary Asia, broadly defined, and, through its research programs, postdoctoral and visiting fellow positions focused on Asia health policy, contemporary Southeast Asia, contemporary Taiwan, and research tracks of the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab.

Learn more about each opportunity and its specific application deadline and requirements:

2027-2028 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Asia

APARC offers two postdoctoral fellowship positions to recent PhD recipients for research on contemporary Asia. The primary research areas focus on political, economic, or social change in the Asia-Pacific region (including Northeast, Southeast, and South Asia), or international relations and international political economy in the region. Appointments are for one academic year beginning in fall quarter 2027. The application deadline is December 1, 2026. 

2027-2028 Asia Health Policy Program Postdoctoral Fellowship

Offered by the Asia Health Policy Program at APARC, the fellowship is awarded to one recent PhD recipient for research on contemporary health or healthcare policy of high relevance to countries in the Asia-Pacific region, especially developing countries. Appointments are for one academic year beginning in fall quarter 2027. The application deadline is December 1, 2026.

2027-2028 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship on Southeast Asia

The Lee Kong Chian Fellowship supports scholarship on contemporary Southeast Asia. It is open to candidates of all career stages with professional backgrounds and ongoing positions in the social sciences or humanities. Lee Kong Chian Fellows spend two to three quarters at Stanford pursuing research and writing projects. APARC's Southeast Asia Program supports research conducted under the fellowship. Appointments must begin and conclude within the period September 1, 2027, to June 30, 2028. The application deadline is January 25, 2027.

Note: The fellowship is no longer offered as a joint-residency program with the National University of Singapore. Fellows appointed through Stanford will be hosted at Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center, while those appointed through NUS will be hosted at NUS. Applicants who wish to pursue the fellowship at NUS should apply through the NUS application portal.

Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab Postdoctoral and Visiting Fellowships

This essay first appeared in The Diplomat.

For decades, South Korean strategy rested on a stable hierarchy within the international order. The alliance with the United States provided security; Seoul then managed relations with Japan, Europe, China, and regional institutions around that anchor. The alliance remains indispensable, but Seoul can no longer assume that this foundation will stay stable.

The evidence is visible in the way Washington now deals with allies. In 2025, the United States initially announced sharply differentiated “reciprocal” tariffs on South Korea, Japan, and the European Union. Negotiations later produced a 15 percent baseline framework for all three, but the process mattered as much as the final rate. Trade access, industrial investment, defense procurement, and alliance politics were increasingly handled as one bargaining package. Allies were not exempt from economic pressure because they were allies.

At the same time, Europe and Asia have been building connections that would have seemed highly ambitious a decade ago. The European Union signed security and defense partnerships with Japan and South Korea in November 2024. This year, the EU and Japan launched a defense-industry dialogue, while the EU and South Korea signed a digital trade agreement and began implementing cooperation on maritime security, cyber and hybrid threats, information manipulation, space, and the defense industry. The strategic map is becoming more networked. 

The network, however, remains uneven. Japan already has a mature economic partnership with the EU and rapidly expanding defense-industry ties. EU-South Korea relations are deepening, but they still lack the density and regular strategic consultation found in EU-Japan ties. A trilateral format would therefore do more than add another meeting: it would reduce asymmetry among three partners whose capabilities are increasingly complementary.

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South Korea, Japan, and the EU now face four converging challenges and pressures.

The first is demographic. South Korea is aging faster than any other OECD society; Japan’s working-age population has been shrinking for decades; and the EU’s fertility rate reached a new low in 2024. Demography is not a social-policy sidebar. It affects defense recruitment, industrial capacity, fiscal room, technological adoption, and the ability to sustain long-term commitments. Each actor is experimenting with immigration, automation, workforce policy, and welfare reform, but the security implications remain largely compartmentalized.

The second is concentrated economic dependence. None of the three can or should decouple from China. Yet South Korea’s experience after the THAAD deployment, Europe’s debates over economic coercion, and China’s export controls on gallium, germanium, and other strategic inputs have shown that interdependence can be converted into leverage. De-risking therefore requires more than national stockpiles. It requires shared risk maps, compatible certification, co-investment in alternative suppliers, and advance consultation before export controls or industrial subsidies create collateral damage among partners.

The third challenge is U.S. volatility. The United States is still the only actor capable of providing extended nuclear deterrence to South Korea and Japan, and NATO remains central to European defense. But dependence on U.S. power now coexists with uncertainty about U.S. policy. The classic alliance dilemmas of abandonment and entrapment are no longer opposite ends of a spectrum. Today, U.S. allies fear both being left out and being drawn into bargains or contingencies they did not shape.

The fourth pressure is the collapse of the old geographic separation between European and Asian security. North Korean munitions, missiles, and troops have supported Russia’s war against Ukraine. Moscow, in turn, has provided Pyongyang with political cover, economic support, and the prospect of military know-how. What happens on a European battlefield is changing the military balance on the Korean Peninsula. A regional response to a cross-regional threat is structurally inadequate.

This is the case for an EU-Japan-South Korea strategic dialogue. This framework should not be described as strategic autonomy, equidistance, or a hedge against the United States. A better term would be institutionalized hedging: risk diversification through standing, rule-based consultation among allies and partners that remain anchored in the broader U.S.-led system.

The proposal is more feasible than ever before. Japan-South Korea relations have improved significantly in recent years. The January 2026 summit in Nara and the reciprocal summit in South Korea in May demonstrated continuity across leadership changes in both countries since June 2025. The EU already has free-trade, digital, green, and security frameworks with both countries. The task is not to invent three new bilateral relationships; it is to connect existing ones.

The dialogue should begin modestly, through a Track 1.5 process involving officials, experts, and industry. Its early agenda must be concrete and specific: a joint critical minerals and supply chain risk assessment; consultation on export controls and investment screening; cooperation on AI, cyber resilience, and digital standards; exchanges on demographic and defense workforce adaptation; and shared monitoring of North Korea-Russia military cooperation. Successful projects could then be elevated to ministerial working groups.

Two design choices are essential. First, the initiative must remain function-driven. It is not NATO, not the Quad, and not an anti-China coalition. Its purpose is to reduce vulnerability without demanding economic separation. Second, it should be complementary to relations with Washington and transparent about that purpose. Horizontal networks strengthen alliances when they help allies absorb shocks, coordinate positions, and arrive at consultations with greater capacity.

For South Korea, the need is particularly acute. Japan already has the G7, a mature economic partnership with the EU, and expanding European defense ties. Seoul’s international weight has grown faster than its institutional depth. An EU-Japan-South Korea dialogue would help close that gap.

Horizontalizing alliances is not a vote of no confidence in the United States. It is insurance for the moments when the United States wavers, overreaches, or changes course. The postwar hierarchy cannot simply be preserved by demanding more reassurance from Washington. Its resilience will depend on whether allies can build connective tissue among themselves before the next crisis forces them to improvise.

Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is delighted to welcome a new cohort of fellows joining us starting in summer 2026.

APARC offers multiple prestigious fellowship opportunities for Stanford doctoral students, emerging scholars of exceptional promise, and accomplished faculty and mid-career experts researching contemporary Asia topics. Supported by these fellowships, our incoming fellows will complete dissertation research, work on book manuscripts, undertake new research projects, and engage with the center's scholarly community.

Meet the Fellows

Herbert Chang is an assistant professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth College and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Science for his work on network science and offshore finance. His research examines how emerging technologies reshape democratic behavior, including recent work on AI and misinformation in the 2024 Taiwan and U.S. presidential elections. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Scientific American, and has informed both academic and policy debates.

Chang will use his time at APARC to write a monograph on the interdependence of AI infrastructure and information ecosystems, with Taiwan and the United States as central empirical sites. He will also collaborate with SNAPL to quantify its talent-portfolio theory and empirically model how Asian Pacific nations cultivate and retain scientific expertise. 

Alicia R. Chen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. She studies international relations and political economy, with a focus on China. Her dissertation examines the domestic political economy of China's international aid and finance, revealing how domestic politics and institutions shape its overseas economic activities.

Her research is published in the British Journal of Political Science and has been generously supported by Stanford’s King Center on Global Development, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, among others.

Before her doctoral studies, Chen was a research specialist with the Empirical Studies of Conflict project at Princeton University. She holds a master's degree in international policy from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Southern California. 

Dr. Sheikh Jamal Hossain is a researcher and academic specializing in child development, maternal mental health, health promotion, and health economics. His professional interests center on advancing evidence-based interventions through rigorous research, teaching, and capacity strengthening, with a commitment to translating scientific evidence into policies and programs that improve the lives of women and children globally.

With over two decades of experience spanning academia, public health research, and international development, Dr. Hossain has led and contributed to large-scale randomized controlled trials, implementation research, and economic evaluations addressing early childhood development, nutrition, maternal mental health, and health system strengthening. He has successfully secured and managed research grants from international donors, including Grand Challenges Canada, UNICEF, FCDO, and Sida.

Dr. Hossain has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications, including 13 as first author, in leading international journals such as The Lancet Regional Health, Pediatrics, Social Science & Medicine, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and BMJ Global Health. He currently mentors multidisciplinary research teams and supervises early-career researchers and graduate students.

He earned his doctorate in women’s and children’s health from Uppsala University, with research focused on the effects of parenting interventions integrated with social protection programs on child development and maternal well-being in Bangladesh. He also holds master's degrees in public health and in health economics from the University of Dhaka.  

Angela Ju is an associate professor of international affairs and political science at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. She uses mixed-methods approaches to study race/ethnicity, gender, international migration, social determinants of health, the nonprofit sector, and urban politics in North America, Latin America, Europe, and East Asia. Her first book, Identities Matter: The Politics of Immigration and Incorporation (Oxford University Press), was published last year. 

While at APARC, Angela will be working on her second monograph, Taiwan's Migration Diplomacy Towards Mainland Chinese Migrants and Refugees. In this book, she will examine why Taiwan has not formed consistent immigration policies for migrants from Mainland China.

Using textual analysis of Taiwanese government legislation and publications, the book's primary argument is that Taiwan uses its migration policies to manage its foreign relations with Mainland China. It also argues that one way in which Taiwan pursues international participation, despite lacking international recognition as a state, is through its migration diplomacy.

Siyu Liang is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research lies at the intersection of political communication, public opinion, and computational social science, focusing on how media and information environments shape political attitudes in both democratic and authoritarian contexts.

Her dissertation examines the role of media in shaping perceptions of China in contemporary U.S.-China relations. In particular, she studies foreign influencer propaganda and the downstream effects of U.S.-China competition on public opinion and intergroup relations. As a computational social scientist, she develops and applies natural language processing and machine learning methods to study political communication and international politics, with particular interests in stance detection, transfer learning, and soft-label modeling.

At the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, she will expand this research agenda by examining how digital media and geopolitical conflict shape public opinion and social exclusion, with a particular focus on U.S.-Asia relations. She will also pursue projects on nationalism and racism in East Asia. Together, these projects seek to advance a more global understanding of how international politics shapes social inclusion and group relations across the Asia-Pacific region.

Siyu received master's degrees in statistics and political science from UCLA and holds bachelor's degrees in political science and statistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Deepika Padmanabhan is a political scientist whose research examines nationalism, language politics, and self-determination, with a regional focus on South Asia. 

Her book project explores how nation-building unfolds not only through grand policies and formal institutions, but also from the ground up, in everyday life. It examines how states promote national languages through routine, informal interactions with citizens, a process she terms the Everyday Imposition of language.

More broadly, her research explores how everyday practices shape political identities and collective belonging. In related projects, she examines the politics of language, food, film, and symbolic rituals as sites through which nationalism is cultivated, contested, and reproduced in daily life.

At APARC, Deepika will revise her book manuscript and develop additional projects on nationalism and political behavior. 

She received her doctorate in political science from Yale University in 2025. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and master’s degrees from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Department of Politics at New York University.

Grace Zeng is a political scientist specializing in international political economy, with a focus on China's use of trade and investment to influence global regulatory governance. Her research examines how states leverage economic tools to shape international rules and institutions. Her work on China's trade practices shows how China uses seemingly technical health and safety regulations to exert pressure on other nations, systematically increasing import restrictions in response to political tensions.

At APARC, she will pursue projects that extend this research agenda by examining China's growing influence in global governance. One project investigates whether China strategically uses infrastructure investment and foreign subsidiaries to shape international environmental standards. Another examines China’s information control system through the lens of its WTO commitments and the global governance of cyberspace.

Before joining Stanford, Grace was a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her doctorate in politics from Princeton University. She also holds a master's degree in the social sciences (MAPSS) from the University of Chicago and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Hong Kong.