Elizabeth Thurbon is a Scientia Fellow, an Associate Professor of International Political Economy and Deputy Head of School (Research) at the School of Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney. She has also held Visiting Fellowships at Seoul National University (Korea Foundation Fellow) and China Foreign Affairs University. Her research specialism is the political economy of techno-industrial development and change, with a particular focus on East Asia, Australia and the US. Her most significant contributions to the field examine the rise and transformation of Northeast Asia’s developmental states, and the relationship between international trade and financial integration and the pursuit of transformative economic and social goals in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. She has written widely on these topics for academic and popular audiences. Her most recent book Developmental Mindset (2016, Cornell University Press) examines the ways in which developmental ways of thinking have informed a strategic approach to financial governance in South Korea from the 1960s to the present. Her recent article reconceptualizing US state power “Power Paradox” (co-authored with Linda Weiss and published in RIPE in 2018) was awarded the AIPEN Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize.
Thurbon is currently a Chief Investigator on two major collaborative grants: an Australian Research Council Discovery Project examining East Asia’s Clean Energy Transition (with SY Kim, J Mathews and H Tan) and an Academy of Korean Studies Laboratory Project Grant examining Korea’s past, present and future development trajectory (with K Lee, DJ Kim, Js Shin J Song and C-y Wong).
Since 2008 she has been a Board Member of the Jubilee Australia Research Centre, a NGO dedicated to research-based advocacy on questions of social, economic and environmental justice in the Asia-Pacific, with a particular focus on Australian government and corporate accountability: http://www.jubileeaustralia.org/.
She holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Sydney. She also completed my Economics (Social Sciences) Degree at Sydney University, where she was awarded first class Honours and the University Medal for Academic Excellence.