معرفی
Pon Souvannaseng is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Bentley University, where she is affiliated with the Department of Global Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Crisis Studies & Mitigation, University of Manchester, and has held fellowships at the Wilson Center and East West Center.
Her research centers on the political economy of global infrastructure, particularly examining the interplay between state and business actors in infrastructure lending and energy development across Asia and Africa. Key interests include the financialization of infrastructure, South-South asymmetric dependencies, and the socio-environmental consequences of large-scale development projects.
Her recent work, including the article Fast Finance & the Political Economy of Catastrophic Dam Collapse in Lao PDR, highlights risks in fast-tracked development finance and governance failures. She investigates how developing nations navigate between multilateral lenders and high-risk bond markets, often facing developmental trade-offs.
- Mansfield-Luce Asia Fellowship (2020–2022)
- Wilson Center China Fellowship (2021–2022)
- APSA Asia Scholar
- Non-Resident Fellow, East West Center (2018–2021)
- Fulbright Doctoral Researcher
- UKRI funded post-doctoral researcher
She has received research support from the Japan Foundation, Luce Foundation, and Bentley University Research Council. Pon has served as a researcher at the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), helped launch the UNRISD Flagship Report 2010, and conducted research for the ASEAN Labour Secretariat. She currently organizes Network B for the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) and serves on the Board of the TLC (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia) Studies Group for the Association for Asian Studies (AAS).
She is actively involved in interdisciplinary research on development and environmental challenges, contributing expert commentary to media outlets such as Reuters and CNN on issues including Africa’s debt crisis and the Lao-China railway project.
