Jiyoon Kim

Focus Areas: International Security, Political Psychology, Foreign Policy, Experimental and Quantitative Methods, Human Rights

Jiyoon Kim is the Wm. Theodore de Bary ’41 Lecturer in Discipline at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and Columbia College. Her research focuses on the psychology of international security, broadly construed. She employs mixed-method approaches to examine questions spanning foreign policy, conflict, and human rights through the psychological dynamics of everyday life.

Her award-winning book manuscript, The Emotional Pulse of Foreign Policy, demonstrates how emotions serve as a key mechanism linking perceptions of other countries to the foreign policy responses they elicit. The project draws on cross-national survey experiments, semi-structured interviews, and computational text analysis, including emotional discourse analysis and large language models (LLMs). Her research has also appeared in journals including International Studies Quarterly.

Before joining Columbia, Kim earned her PhD in Political Science from The Ohio State University. Originally from South Korea, her research reflects a broader interest in East Asia, which serves as an important regional setting for her work on security, and political psychology.

Education

• PhD in Political Science, Ohio State University
• MA in Political Science, Korea University
• BA in Economics and Political Science 

Honors & Awards

• Roberta Sigel Best Conference Paper by Early Career Member Award, International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), 2026
• Academy Fellow, International Society of Political Psychology, Prague, 2025
• Harvard Research and Academic Exchange Scholar, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2024