Steven Denney

Background

About Steven Denney

I am an assistant professor of International Relations and Korean Studies at Leiden University. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on research methodology, comparative politics, IR, and area studies. Trained as a political scientist, I conduct research on migration and governance, nations and nationalism, and international organization. I am particularly interested in the relationship between nationalism and political institutions. I primarily rely on surveys and experimental designs to analyze public opinion and political behavior, but I also use computational approaches to analyze text as data, including topic modeling and other natural language processing techniques. My current projects explore how large language models (LLMs) can augment or extend conventional methods in the study of political discourse. In addition, I am a senior editor at SinoNK.com, a senior fellow at the European Centre for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna, and a non-resident fellow in the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto. I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, an M.A. in Global Affairs and Policy from Yonsei University, and a B.A. in Political Science from Harding University.