PhD candidate Minseon Ku has been awarded a doctoral dissertation grant of $2500 from the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. This grant is "intended to recognize and support the work of emerging scholars from around the world engaged in cutting-edge research on public diplomacy." Ku will use the grant to visit Nixon and Clinton presidential libraries to collect data on foreign trips made by Nixon and Clinton to China and Vietnam respectively.

Ku, who specializes in International Relations and Political Psychology, will use this grant to support her research for her dissertation, "Seeing is Believing: Summit Diplomacy and Public Perception of Security."  

Ku's dissertation uses diplomatic archives and survey experiments to "theorize summits as international performances with ontological (in)security effects on domestic publics as audiences to performances of rapprochement in four summits: US-China summit in 1972, South Korea-Japan summits in 1983 and 1984, and US-Vietnam summit in 2000." 

Congratulations, Minseon!