Recent Success for GRI’s Postdoctoral Fellows Program

Amidst a tough academic job market across higher education, GRI’s postdoctoral fellows program had a banner year. Four postdoctoral fellows in residence this past year and one recent alumni have landed impressive positions at leading academic institutions around the world. 

 

Dr. Moritz Graefrath, a postdoctoral fellow with GRI’s Security and Foreign Policy Initiative (SFPI) and an expert on order collapse in international politics, will start this fall as the tenure-track Wick Cary Assistant Professor of International Security at the University of Oklahoma.  

 

 

Dr. Kyuri Park, who also served as an SFPI postdoctoral fellow and specializes in joint military exercises in the Asia-Pacific region, will start in February 2026 as a tenure-track Lecturer (Assistant Professor equivalent) in International Relations and International Security at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

 

 

Dr. Minseon Ku, who analyzes summit diplomacy as social spaces and worked with William & Mary’s Diplomacy Lab, will become a tenure-track Assistant Professor with the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy at DePaul University. 

 

 

Finally, Dr. Sara Sayedi, a joint postdoctoral fellow between GRI and VIMS, will wrap up her work on W&M’s Nepal Water Initiative this fall to become a permanent member of AidData’s Research and Evaluation Unit.

 

 

Recent success for GRI’s postdoctoral fellows program has not been confined to those scholars departing this year alone, either. Dr. Giuseppe Paparella, who served as GRI’s inaugural Security and Foreign Policy Initiative postdoctoral fellow from 2022 to 2024, will become a Lecturer (Assistant Professor equivalent) in East Asian Security at King’s College London this fall. Dr. Paparella, currently in residence as a postdoctoral fellow with the University of Oxford and an expert on the socio-psychological dimensions of American statecraft in the Asia-Pacific region, will also publish his first book that he wrote while in residence at GRI. Entitled, Abiding Influence: Presidents, Nationalist Beliefs, and US Policy in the Asia-Pacific, 1898-1972, it will come out with Stanford University Press in November.