Soosun You is a Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she will join as an Assistant Professor beginning in July, 2025. She specializes in Comparative Politics and Political Behavior, with regional expertise in South Korea. Her work focuses on addressing various challenges to achieving gender equality. She is currently working on a book project that examines how changes in demographic and marital market dynamics have shaped the trajectory of women’s rights in South Korea. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods, the book investigates the emergence of various anti-natalist and pro-natalist government policies, and how they have evolved, as South Korea transitioned from an autocracy to a democracy in the last few decades.
Soosun is a 2024-2025 CSIS US-Korea NextGen Scholar and a recipient of the 2024 Empirical Study of Gender Research Network’s (EGEN) Prize. Her work has also been supported by the Academy of Korean Studies, the Northeast Asia Council, Korea Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received her Ph.D. In political science from UC Berkeley in 2024.