June Park

Dr. June Park is a 2021-22 Fung Global Fellow of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. She is a political economist by training and works on trade, energy, and tech conflicts with a broader range of regional focuses not just on the U.S. and East Asia, but also Europe. She studies economic pressures and conflicts, analyzing different policy outcomes based on governance structures – domestic institutions, leaderships, and bureaucracies that shape the policy formation process. Her current work pertains to post-pandemic geoeconomic conflicts in data governance and technology.

As a 2020-21 East Asia Voices Initiative Fellow of the East Asia National Resources Center at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs, she has focused on data privacy, governance of AI, and country-specific initiatives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she has published widely on South Korea’s pandemic governance while remotely conducting her fellowship at GWU from Seoul, South Korea. She continues to research on the varieties of data governance in relation to the adoption of emerging technologies in the post pandemic era as a visiting scholar at the Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub at GWU. At Princeton, she will investigate the varied levels of country access to vaccines and the governance of vaccine procurement in global supply chains, alongside data deployment in vaccination processes across jurisdictions, with a specific case study on U.S.-South Korea vaccine production utilizing South Korea's smart factories and bilateral research collaboration.

She is concurrently pursuing the publication of her first book manuscript, DIGITAL TRADE WARS & CURRENCY CONFLICT: China, South Korea and Japan’s Responses to U.S. Protectionism since COVID-19 under a National Research Foundation of Korea book grant, and the launch of her second book project, EUROPE’s CHALLENGES & RESPONSES: Between Faustian Bargains with China and U.S. Pressures since Brexit, intended for the European Research Council Starting Grant. Using a framework of institutional variance, her first book attempts to answer why the three countries have not acted the same upon encountering U.S. protectionism pre-and post-COVID-19 and offers a mechanism for predicting policy moves. Her second book project will examine the varied policy responses toward pressures from China and the U.S. by Germany, France, Italy within the EU and the UK post-Brexit in the post-COVID digital age.

Dr. Park earned her BA and MA in political science with a focus on international security from Korea University, and has held an internship at the UN Security Council Sanctions Subsidiary Organs Branch. She received her PhD in Political Science with a focus on international political economy from Boston University as a Fulbright Fellow and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

Outside academia, she advises public and private sectors with regional and country expertise. She provides expert commentary to various international media outlets and contributes her analysis to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and analysis division of Economist Group, a leading source analysis on international business and world affairs. She also serves as an expert for international consulting firms Duco and Enquire.