Ketian Vivian Zhang joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as the 2018-2019 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia. Ketian studies coercion, economic sanctions, and maritime territorial disputes in international relations and social movements in comparative politics, with a regional focus on China and East Asia. She bridges the study of international relations and comparative politics and has a broader theoretical interest in linking international security and international political economy. Her book project examines when, why, and how China uses coercion when faced with issues of national security, such as territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas, foreign arms sales to Taiwan, and foreign leaders’ reception of the Dalai Lama. Ketian's research has been supported by organizations such as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.

At Shorenstein APARC, Ketian worked on turning parts of her book project into academic journal papers while conducting fieldwork for her next major project: examining how target states of Chinese coercion respond to China's assertiveness, including the business community and ordinary citizens.

Ketian received her Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018, where she is also an affiliate of the Security Studies Program. Before coming to Stanford, Ketian was a Predoctoral Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Ketian holds a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was previously a research intern at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., where she was a contributor to its website Foreign Policy in Focus.

Eloise Duvillier is the Program Manager of the Program on Democracy and the Internet at the Cyber Policy Center. She previously was a HR Program Manager and acting HR Business Partner at Bytedance Inc, a rapidly-growing Chinese technology startup. At Bytedance, she supported the globalization of the company by driving US acquisition integrations in Los Angeles and building new R&D teams in Seattle and Silicon Valley. Prior to Bytedance, she led talent acquisition for Baidu USA LLC’s artificial intelligence division. She began her career in the nonprofit industry where she worked in foster care, HIV education and emergency response during humanitarian crises, as well as helping war-torn communities rebuild. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in Development Studies, focusing on political economics in unindustrialized societies.

Sophie Lemiere is a Political Anthropologist at the Ash Center for Democracy in the Democracy in Hard Places program. She has been awarded the Stanford-NUS 2018-2019 Lee King Chiang Fellow and will be at Stanford in the fall then Singapore in the spring.

Her research looks at the nexus between religion, politics and criminality in a comparative perspective, focussing upon the deep structure of political systems. She received her PhD from Sciences-Po, France, her thesis was the first study on the political role of gangs through umbrella NGOs in Malaysia. Her Masters research on the apostasy controversies and Islamic civil society was awarded the second prize for International Young Scholar from the ISIM, Leiden in 2007. She has held research positions at RSIS-NTU in 2011 then at ARI in 2012 and has been visiting fellow at the University of Sydney, Cornell, UC Berkeley and Columbia. Sophie believes it is essential for academics to disseminate their research to a wide audience, and primarily in the countries they study. With this idea in mind, she has oriented her efforts towards the publication of original scholarship addressing both a general and academic audience within and outside of Malaysia. With this in mind, Sophie Lemière is the editor of a series “Malaysian Politics and People”. The first volume Misplaced Democracy was released in 2014, the second volume Illusions of democracy was published in 2017 and will be re-published in 2018 by Amsterdam University Press; the third volume is expected for 2019. Her monograph “Gangsters and Masters: Complicit Militancy and Authoritarian Politics” will be published also 2019. Sophie currently works on a political biography of Mahathir campaign “The Last Game: Malaysian Politics in the Eye of Mahathir”.

She has made considerable efforts to give visibility to Malaysian Studies by publishing in both international academic and non-academic outlets, Sophie has a blog on Mediapart and regularly contributes to publications such as New Mandala, The Conversation, Le Monde, Libération.

Sophie has also started to develop several documentary projects with French production companies, including a series on the Arts and Politics. Her first film 9/43 featured the Malaysian cartoonist Zunar and was selected among the 25 best movies of the French short-film festival ‘Infracourt’ in 2016.