John Nilsson-Wright (formerly Swenson-Wright) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (FAMES) at the University of Cambridge and an Official Fellow at Darwin College. He is a graduate of Christ Church and St. Antony’s Colleges, Oxford, and SAIS Johns Hopkins University. He was Head of the Chatham House Asia Programme from March 2014 to October 2016 and has also been the Senior Research Fellow for Northeast Asia and Korea Foundation Fellow with Chatham House’s Asia-Pacific Programme. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Sejong Institute in Seoul, ROK; Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Korea Centre, East Asia Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS); and a non-resident fellow at the Centre for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on Cold War history including US-Japan alliance ties, and the contemporary international relations and politics of Northeast Asia, with reference to Japan and the Koreas. In his policy work, he focuses on regional security and the changing nature of alliance relations in East Asia. He is currently writing a monograph on populism and identity politics as a contemporary and historical phenomenon in both Europe and Northeast Asia.
Key publications:
John Swenson-Wright, Unequal Allies? United States Security and Alliance Policy Towards Japan, 1945-1960 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, March 2005.
John Nilsson-Wright, ed. The Politics and International Relations of Modern Korea (London, UK: Routledge, 2016). Four volumes
John Swenson-Wright, ed., The Best Course Available (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002)
John Nilsson-Wright, “Yoon’s vision for South Korea as a Global Pivotal State: Is there anything to it?” Global Asia, 18, 1, March 2023.
