Jiyoon Kim

Hello, and welcome!

I’m a Lecturer at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), specializing in the political psychology of international security, broadly construed.

My research centers on the political psychology of international security, broadly construed to include foreign policy, conflict resolution, human rights, and public opinion. While my theoretical frameworks are global in scope, I maintain a specialized regional focus on East Asia, particularly the Korean Peninsula. I pursue this agenda through a robust mixed-methods toolkit, integrating qualitative methods and survey experiments with computational statistics and natural language processing, and with a focus on East Asia.

Based on my dissertation, my book manuscript—The Emotional Pulse of Foreign Policy: Status Perceptions, Emotions, and Policy Preferences—demonstrates that emotions are a key mechanism linking perceptions of other countries to the foreign policies they attract. I draw on evidence from cross-national survey experiments, semi-structured interviews, and text analysis using emotional discourse analysis and large language models (LLMs). A paper drawn from this project won the 2026 Roberta Sigel Best Conference Paper by Early Career Member Award from the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP).

Before coming to Columbia, I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from The Ohio State University, and my M.A. in Political Science and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Korea University in South Korea. If you’re interested in my work or would like to connect, I’d love to hear from you.