Professor, Diplomacy and World Affairs
B.A., M.A., New York University; Ph.D., George Washington University
Department Chair,
Diplomacy & World Affairs
Appointed In
2005
Office
Johnson 205
Hours
T/ in person 11:30-12:45 & by zoom appt Fridays 9:00-10:00
Chu’s research and teaching interests focus on religion and politics/international relations theory, the Catholic Church and global politics, faith diplomacy, inter-religious dialogue, political ideologies (theory and practice), and the political liberalization processes of former and existing communist countries.
She is the co-author of On the Significance of Religion in Climate Change (Routledge Press, 2025) and Ideology: A Primer for the Exercise of Power or its Resistance (forthcoming Routledge Press, 2027).
Her articles have appeared in Politics and Religion, Democratization,
Currently, she is working on a research project that examines the Catholic Church’s position on global issues. She theorizes how this amount to an unofficial foreign policy on matters of conflict, peace, climate change, and migration.
Professor Chu has received a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern California, served on the Executive Council of the Western Political Science Association (2018-2021), a Country Expert for the University of Gothenburg’s Varieties of Democracy Project, and an editorial board member of the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities. She was awarded Oxy’s Linda & Tod White Teaching Prize (2022) and the Faculty Prize for Advising Excellence (2025). In 2022, she was appointed as the inaugural Faculty Director for Equity and Justice.
Selected Publications:
- “The Vicissitudes of Church-State Relations: The Catholic Church in Post-1975 Vietnam,” in The Handbook on Vietnamese Christianity (Brill Press, 2026).
- Co-Authored with A. Kammas, “Religion and Citizenship,” in The Routledge Handbook of Politics and Religion in Contemporary America, (Routledge Press, 2024).
- Leading the way: The Holy See, diplomacy, and Vietnam" UCA News (2024)
- “God is Green: The Catholic Church’s Re-Imagination of Environmental Norms,” Politics and Religion, (2022): 1-20.
COURSES
DWA 101 - International Relations: The Changing Rules of the Game
DWA 236 - Ideology at the Extremes
DWA 237 - Cuba, China, Vietnam: Communism in a Post Communism World
DWA 299 - Qualitative Methods and Research Design
DWA 310 - Junior Seminar: Religion and Politics
DWA 337 - Junior Seminar: International Relations Theory
DWA 490 - Senior Seminar in Diplomacy/World Affairs