Derek Steiger

I am originally from Eastern Oklahoma. I served on Active Duty as an Infantryman in the US Army (2003-2006) and then spent two years following that in the Oklahoma National Guard (2006-2008). I attended undergrad at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah and graduated with a BA in Political Science (2010). I went on to work on my PhD in Political Science at OU. My fields of research were International Relations and Comparative Politics. I received my Master’s Degree in Political Science (2014) and then went on to finish my PhD (2021). While working on my PhD I attended a US State Department funded language immersion program in 2013 and then taught a course at Nanjing University in the summer of 2016. My primary areas of research are on the role of political rhetoric in social mobilization, nationalism and ethnic conflict, and Chinese Foreign Policy.