Hasta Colman

Hasta Colman is an America in the World Consortium Predoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also the Asia Policy Program Fellow. Hasta comes to UT Austin from the Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington D.C. Most recently, she was a visiting Ph.D. fellow at Nanjing University, while conducting fieldwork in China. She has also recently conducted research in Nepal, India, Cambodia, and Thailand. 

Hasta’s research centers on China’s foreign policy. Her dissertation examines China’s engagement with neighboring states through the lens of nontraditional security issues, such as trafficking, illicit finance, and non-state armed groups. Straddling the disciplines of security studies, international relations, and area studies, her work investigates the impact of domestic politics on foreign policy.

Hasta holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She was a National Bureau of Asian Research Ph.D. Fellow at National Taiwan University, a Research Fellow at Fudan University, and a scholarship student at Tsinghua University in China. She is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Prior to her doctoral studies, Hasta worked with NGOs in and lived in Asia for nearly a decade.