Celeste Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. She is the Director of the GW Institute for Korea Studies and Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2024-present). She specializes in comparative public policy, law and social change, lawyers, and governance, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. She is also interested in Northeast Asian security, North Korean human rights, and transnational activism. Her first book was Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (Cornell, 2016). She has published numerous articles and she coedited Rights Claiming in South Korea with Patricia Goedde (Cambridge, 2021). Her forthcoming book analyzes the legalistic turn in Korean and Japanese regulatory style through paired case studies related to tobacco control and disability rights. She received a PhD from UC Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an AB from Princeton University. She has been a fellow at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. GW’s Office of the Vice President for Research awarded her the 2021 Early Career Research Scholar Award. Her article with Claudia Kim, “Knowledge Production Through Legal Mobilization: Environmental Activism Against the U.S. Military Bases in East Asia,” won the 2023 Asian Law and Society Association’s distinguished article.

For further details, please click here.

Harvard Law School East Asian Legal Studies Program and Harvard Law School Project on Disability lecture co-sponsored by the Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute and Weatherhead Center Program on US-Japan Relations