dr. Mina Erika Pollmann

Lecturer, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Political Science and Public Administration

Personal information

Previous work experiences include: Presidential Management Fellow with the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Japanese Affairs; Associate Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation’s Defense and Political Science Department; and News Producer for TV Tokyo’s Washington, DC Bureau. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT (qualifying in international relations and comparative politics and being affiliated with the Security Studies Program), and a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Her doctoral dissertation examined the Political Origins of Alliances using historical cases from Japan. She was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support her dissertation research, and I have held visiting research appointments with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science.

She speaks English and Japanese fluently.

Research

Mina Pollmann's research interests are Japan’s security and diplomacy, the U.S.-Japan alliance, U.S. foreign policy, alliance politics, Indo-Pacific security, and Dutch-Japan security cooperation. She regularly writes on these topics for The Diplomat, participates in Track 1.5 Dialogues such as the Japan Trilateral Forum and the Indo-Pacific Dialogue, writes reports for and speaks to government audiences, and speaks to the public, including at Leiden University, European University Institute (EUI). She is also a Senior Associate Researcher at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy, and Strategy.

Teaching

She is currently a lecturer on alliance politics, foreign policy, international diplomacy, and international security at the Vrije University of Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam.

Ancillary activities