Kristin Vekasi

Kristin Vekasi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Policy and International Affairs at the University of Maine. She received her PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in May 2014. Her research interests include the international politics of Northeast Asia and international political economy, and she has conducted research and fieldwork throughout Japan and China. Dr. Vekasi’s scholarship examines the effects of political crises on economic exchange and the strategies multinational firms use to mitigate those risks. Her book Cold Politics, Hot Economics: The Japanese Firm in China (forthcoming) examines these themes, and other work has appeared in the Chinese Journal of International Politics and Japanese Journal of Political Science. Vekasi grew up in the National Park Service, living in Glacier National Park in Montana and Acadia National Park in Maine, attended New College of Florida as an undergraduate, and was a Fulbright Fellow at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan before beginning post-graduate studies.