Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell

Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell is a Lecturer and Program Coordinator with the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He received his PhD in Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2022. His research focuses on authoritarian nostalgia and related political behavior in post-authoritarian democracies, especially East Asian countries. His dissertation investigates why individual voters feel nostalgic for an authoritarian past and vote for political parties that are linked to the past. His research has been supported by various sources, including a Taiwan Fellowship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

At Johns Hopkins, his teaching focuses on comparative politics, data analysis, and experimental methods. At the University of Illinois, he was named four times to the “List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent” and received the A. Belden Fields Award for Graduate Student Teaching as a TA from the Department of Political Science based on recommendations from students and faculty members.