Janet E. Steele
Interim Director, Sigur Center for Asian Studies
Janet Steele is a Professor of Media and Public Affairs and International Affairs, and the Interim Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. She received her Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University, and her research focuses on how culture is communicated through the mass media. Dr. Steele is a frequent visitor to Southeast Asia where she lectures on topics ranging from the role of the press in a democratic society to specialized courses on narrative journalism. Her book, Wars Within: The Story of Tempo, an Independent Magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia, focuses on Tempo magazine and its relationship to the politics and culture of New Order Indonesia. In Mediating Islam, Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia, Dr. Steele explores the relationship between journalism and Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Awarded two Fulbright teaching and research grants to Indonesia and a third to Serbia, she has served as a State Department speaker-specialist in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Brunei, the Philippines, East Timor, Taiwan, Burma, Sudan, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, Jamaica, and Kosovo. Dr. Steele is also the author of numerous articles on journalism theory and practice: her 2014 book, Email Dari Amerika, (Email from America), is a collection of newspaper columns written in Indonesian and originally published in the newspaper Surya. Her most recent book is called Malaysiakini and the Power of Independent Media in Malaysia.
Deepa Ollapally
Associate Director
Deepa M. Ollapally (she/her) is a political scientist specializing in Indian foreign policy, South Asian security, India-China relations, and Indo-Pacific regional and maritime security. She is Research Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Director of the Sigur Center. She also directs the Rising Powers Initiative, a major research program which tracks and analyzes foreign policy debates in aspiring powers of Asia and Eurasia.
Dr. Ollapally is currently working on a book titled Big Power Competition for Influence in the Indo-Pacific, which assesses the shifting patterns of geopolitical influence by major powers in the region since 2005 and the drivers of these changes. She is the author of five books, including Worldviews of Aspiring Powers (Oxford, 2012) and The Politics of Extremism in South Asia (Cambridge 2008). Her most recent books are two edited volumes, Energy Security in Asia and Eurasia (Routledge, 2017) and Nuclear Debates in Asia: The Role of Geopolitics and Domestic Processes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
Dr. Ollapally has received grants from the Carnegie Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Asia Foundation for projects related to India and Asia.
Previously, she served as Associate Professor at Swarthmore College and has been a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London and Columbia University. Dr. Ollapally also held senior positions in the policy world, including at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India. She is a commentator in the media, frequently appearing on CNN, BBC, Reuters TV and CBS. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.
Haroon Rasheed
Program Associate
1957 E Street, NW, Suite 503P
Haroon Rasheed (he/him) is the Program Associate for the Sigur Center, the Institute for Korean Studies, and the East Asia National Resource Center. He manages the operational and administrative tasks, which encompass finance, grants, fellowships, and program development. Mr. Rasheed holds a Bachelor of Business Administration (Honors) degree with a concentration on management studies. Haroon also has diplomas in leadership development and accountancy. He has previously worked as a Consultant for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, a Senior Program Advisor for the Royal Danish Embassy in Afghanistan, a Consultant at the World Bank, and Advisor for the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development. Mr. Rasheed’s previously roles involved program management, portfolio coordination, fund management, and program/project implementation. Rasheed is also a polyglot, proficient in English, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, and Hindi.
Adam Bubanich
Program Coordinator
1957 E Street, NW, Suite 503N
Tel: (202) 994-2116
abubanich@gwu.edu
Adam Bubanich (he/him) is the Program Coordinator for the Sigur Center. He previously served as Program Coordinator for GW’s East Asian National Resource Center. Mr. Bubanich holds a B.A. in Political Science and International Affairs with a Minor in Mandarin Chinese from Northeastern University.
At Northeastern, he completed two cooperative education programs (Co-Ops): at the Massachusetts Senate and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. In the State Senate, Mr. Bubanich served as Legislative Fellow to Senator Sal DiDomenico; in this role, Mr. Bubanich’s work involved issues on the expansion of benefits to low-income families in Massachusetts. At the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Mr. Bubanich worked with partners in Qatar and Denmark to apply improvement science to everyday healthcare practices.
Mr. Bubanich has also worked as a Research Assistant at Northeastern University School of Law, where he analyzed the evolving relationship between LGBTQ+ Cubans and U.S. state policies.
In studying how countries utilize museums to form certain narratives, Mr. Bubanich has travelled to China, Germany, and Poland.
Mr. Bubanich is an M.A. Candidate in Asian Studies at GW; his research interests include Taiwanese transitional justice, memory and forgetting in genocide and mass atrocities, the use of museums to uphold or undermine state narratives, LGBTQ rights in East Asia, authoritarian states, and states in transition.
East Asia National Resource Center
Jisoo Kim
Principal Investigator
Jisoo M. Kim (she/her) is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She also serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies. Dr. Kim received her Ph.D. in Korean History from Columbia University. She is a specialist in gender and legal history of early modern Korea. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing.
Dr. Kim is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a new book project titled Suspicious Deaths: Forensic Medicine, Dead Bodies, and Criminal Justice in Chosŏn Korea.
Asian Studies Program
Celeste Arrington
Interim Director, Asian Studies Program
Professor Arrington specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research interests include law and social change, legal professionals, social movements, democratic governance, the media, comparative policy processes, and qualitative research methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism. She is a core faculty member of the Institute for Korean Studies.
Professor Arrington’s first book was Accidental Activists: Victims and Government Accountability in Japan and South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2016). Her research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Law & Policy, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, Foreign Affairs, and the Washington Post, among other outlets.
Her current book, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press’ Studies in Law and Society, analyzes the changing role of lawyers and litigation in policy-making in Japan and Korea through paired case studies related to disability rights and tobacco control. She co-edited with Patricia Goedde a volume entitled Rights-Claiming in South Korea, forthcoming via Cambridge University Press.
Professor Arrington earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. from Princeton University. She was an Advanced Research Fellow in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University from 2010-2011. During the 2011-2012 academic year, she served as a Faculty Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was also a Member of the Mike and Maureen Mansfield Foundation’s U.S.-Japan Network for the Future and its U.S.-Korea Scholar-Policymaker Nexus. In 2017-2018, she was a Fellow at the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University.
Staff Assistants
Raihan Choudhury
Project Assistant
Raihan Choudhury (he/him) is a junior at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, majoring in Political Science. As a Project Assistant, Mr. Choudhury develops the Sigur Center’s Weekly Digest newsletter, as well as provides administrative and logistical support to help run and prepare for hosting Sigur Center-sponsored events.
Francis Garcia
Communications Assistant
Francis Garcia (he/him) is a junior at the Elliott School of International Affairs, with research interests in regional integration, global governance, and public international law. Mr. Garcia speaks beginner Mandarin Chinese, among other languages, and is a 2023 Charles B. Rangel Scholar of the U.S. Department of State. As a Communications Assistant, he supports the production and publication of marketing materials at the Center.
Akber Latif
Events Assistant
Akber Latif (he/him) is a senior at the Elliott School of International Affairs, concentrating in Conflict Resolution and minoring in Economics and Political Science. As an Events Assistant, Mr. Latif helps with event preparation as well as pre-event and post-event tasks such as promotion and providing logistical support during the question and answer period of the events.
Emily Huang
Communications Assistant
Emily Huang (she/her) is a freshman at the Elliot School of International Affairs studying international affairs with a minor in applied ethics. She has a strong interest in U.S.-China relations, Chinese History and governance, and international criminal law. Ms. Huang is native in the Chinese language, and helps assists with social media graphics, as well as supporting the logistics of Asian studies events.
