Political Science Research Lab

Xinru Ma is an assistant professor in the School of International Relations and Diplomacy at the Beijing Foreign Studies University in China. Originally from China, Xinru's research and teaching focus on nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security with a methodological focus on big data and formal methods. Her research is informed by extensive field research in Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and China. More broadly, Xinru is interested in public opinion and new methods of measuring it, foreign policy formation, alliance politics, and the historical relations of East Asia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Quarterly, the Journal of Global Security Studies, and the Journal of European Public Policy, and in edited volumes through Palgrave. She is also the leading author of the latest manuscript Asian Power Transitions (Columbia University Press). She is currently working on a book project that uses formal methods to explore the mechanisms through which nationalist protests influence international crisis bargaining. Previously, Xinru was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University (2019-2020), and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University (2018-2019). She obtained her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California in August 2019.