Ayumi Teraoka

Ayumi Teraoka is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and a lecturer at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Her research focuses on coercive diplomacy, alliance politics in the Indo-Pacific, and Japanese foreign policy and national security.

Ayumi was a 2022–2023 America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, entitled Autonomy Preserved: A Manual for U.S. Alliance Management in the Shadow of U.S.-China Competition, examines the interactive effects of U.S. alliance management efforts and China’s attempts to weaken U.S. alliances from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Ayumi received her Ph.D. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University where she was an A.B. Krongard fellow from 2021 to 2022. She was also a World Politics and Statecraft Fellow with the Smith Richardson Foundation in 2022. She holds an M.A. in Public Affairs from Princeton University, an M.A. in Asian Studies from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Law from Keio University. Previously, Ayumi also worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC from 2013 to 2017. Her writing has appeared in The Japan Times, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, and Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs among others.