Minseon Ku is an Assistant Professor at the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy at DePaul University and a Nonresident Fellow with the Reimagining US Diplomacy Project under the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program. Her primary research interests are in understanding diplomacy as a social practice generating profound implications for international security.

Her first book project, The Power of Performance: Summits and World Politics, selected for the Scholar’s Circle at the 2024 ISA Northeast conference, explores how summits shape, and are shaped by the domestic public’s beliefs about interstate relations, other states’ intentions, and the long-term trajectory of foreign policy by analyzing American public opinion towards US summits with adversaries during and after the Cold War.

Her research has been published or is forthcoming in European Journal of International Relations, Hague Journal of Diplomacy, International Organization, International Studies Perspectives, Media, War & Conflict, and Review of International Studies. She has also contributed policy commentaries on US-North Korea nuclear summits, inter-Korean relations, and South Korea’s foreign policy and summits to The Diplomat, The National Interest, East Asian Forum, and 38 North, among others.

Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Diplomacy Project at William & Mary Global Research Institute and the Spencer Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth. She earned her MA and PhD in Political Science (with a minor in Political Psychology) from The Ohio State University and a Master’s in Global Affairs and Policy and a BA in Political Science & International Relations from Yonsei University in Seoul.

Her other policy areas of focus include nuclear summitry and diplomacy, public diplomacy, and non-state actor diplomacy in international security, with a regional focus on East Asia.