Victor Cha

Victor D. Cha (Ph.D. Columbia, MA Oxford, BA Columbia) is Distinguished University Professor, D.S. Song-KF Chair, and Professor of Government in the School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown. He is a dedicated academician having been a member of the Georgetown faculty for almost three decades since joining the university in 1995. He served for one decade as director of Asian Studies, creating the M.A. degree in Asian Studies (MASIA), and bringing over some $2 million in US Department of Education Title VI funding on Asia to campus for the first time in Georgetown's history. He served as Vice Dean for Faculty and Graduate Affairs in the SFS from 2019 to 2023. Outside of Georgetown, Dr. Cha holds research positions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC., is a member of the non-partisan Defense Policy Board for the Biden administration, and is on the Boards of the National Endowment for Democracy and the Korea Society. He left the White House in May 2007 after serving since 2004 as Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council (on public service leave from the University). At the White House, he was responsible primarily for Japan, the Korean peninsula, Australia/New Zealand and Pacific Island nation affairs. Dr. Cha was also the Deputy Head of Delegation for the United States at the Six Party Talks in Beijing. He is an award-winning author, and his seven books are: Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle (Stanford University Press) (winner of the 2000 Ohira Book Prize); Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (Columbia University Press, 2004 with Dave Kang); Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia (Columbia, 2009); The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (HarperCollins, 2012) (selected as a best book on Asia by Foreign Affairs in 2012); Powerplay: Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton University Press,2016); Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale Univ. Press, 2023 with R. Pardo). His forthcoming book is The Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea (Columbia, Sept. 2024 release). He has written articles on international relations and East Asia in journals including Foreign Affairs, International Security, Political Science Quarterly, Survival, International Studies Quarterly, and Asian Survey. Professor Cha is a former John M. Olin National Security Fellow at Harvard University, two-time Fulbright Scholar, and Hoover National Fellow, CISAC Fellow, William J. Perry Fellow, and Koret Fellow at Stanford University. He is a Senior Fellow (non-resident) in Human Freedom at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, Texas. He holds Georgetown’s Dean’s Award for teaching in 2010, the Distinguished Research Award for 2011, and a Distinguished Principal Investigator Award for 2016. He has testified before Congress on Asian security issues, and has been recognized for community service work by Asian American organizations in New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Georgia. He is a News Contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, and has been a guest analyst for various other national and international media including PBS, NPR, Bloomberg, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and Comedy Central. He has a cameo role (as himself) in the action film “Red Dawn” (Contrafilm, MGM, Newman Entertainment) released in November 2012, and has appeared as a featured guest on The Colbert Report. In 2023, the American Political Science Association (APSA) named Cha the 2023 recipient of the Hubert H. Humphrey award for notable public service by a political scientist. According to ScholarGPS (2022), Cha is the highest ranked, living political scientist in the world specializing on Korea based on publication record, citation count, and impact (h-index).