Celeste Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She is the Director of the GW Institute for Korea Studies and Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2024-present). She is also a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. Her comparative research examines public policy, law and social change, lawyers, and governance, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Other research interests include Northeast Asian security, North Korean human rights, and transnational activism. Her first book was Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (Cornell, 2016). She has published numerous articles and, with Patricia Goedde, she co-edited Rights Claiming in South Korea (Cambridge, 2021). Her newest book, published in 2025 in Cambridge’s Studies in Law and Society series, is entitled From Manners to Rules: Advocating for Legalism in South Korea and Japan. It analyzes the legalistic turn in Korean and Japanese regulatory style through paired case studies related to tobacco control and disability rights. She received a PhD from UC Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an AB from Princeton University. She has been a fellow at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. GW’s Office of the Vice President for Research awarded her the 2021 Early Career Research Scholar Award. Her article with Claudia Kim won the 2023 Asian Law and Society Association’s distinguished article award.