Ayumi Teraoka is an America in the World Consortium Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she was also the A.B. Krongard fellow from 2021 to 2022. Her research focuses on coercive diplomacy, alliance politics in the Indo-Pacific, and Japanese foreign policy and national security. 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. In 2022, she was a World Politics and Statecraft Fellow with the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Previously, Ayumi worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. Her writing has appeared in The Japan Times, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, and Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs among others. 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.