Hello!
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Email: cster@g.ucla.edu Hello! I am currently a Rosenwald Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth’s Dickey Center for International Understanding for AY2024-25. I received my Ph.D from at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Summer of 2024, and was previously a US-Asia Grand Strategy Pre-doctoral Fellow with the Korean Studies Institute at University of Southern California. I’m grateful to be under the advisement of Prof Chad Hazlett. Name Pronunciation: “Kee-ruh” (Irish spellings are bonkers) |
Research
My research explores the interplay between domestic and international politics, seeking to understand, first, when and why foreign affairs becomes salient in the national dialogue, and, second, the ways in which the political climate at home affects state behavior on the international stage. With a substantive focus on East Asia, my dissertation examines first, where states strategically pursue aggressive foreign policy for domestic ends, leveraging interstate rivalry and historical memory to amplify perceptions of foreign threat and rile anti-foreign nationalism. In my current book project and extension of my dissertation work, I further examine how citizens respond to conflictual foreign policy in ways that affect larger political landscapes both home and abroad.
Additionally, I am also interested in political methodology. In separate projects, I explore applications of LLMs for social science research as well as methods for reducing user-specification sensitivity and bias in survey weighting for more accurate, representative surveys.
Teaching
At UCLA, I have twice taught a specialized upper-division seminar “Politics of East Asia: Unique Puzzles in International Relations” as well as our department’s required statistics class for all majors “Introduction to Data Analysis.” As a TA, I have also taught in Introduction to IR, as well as in graduate-level methodology courses including MLE, Causal Inference, and Experimental Design. I have also served as our department “Math Maven” assisting fellow graduate students on any problems related to methodology in their research or coursework for several years and additionally taught the “Math Camp” review crash course for incoming first year graduate students.
CV
Please find my current CV here