Pon Souvannaseng is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Bentley University. A political economist by training, her research examines state and business behavior in global infrastructure competition and its social, environmental and fiscal implications.

She studies the intersection of private and public sector actors in comparative global infrastructure lending and energy development in Asia and Africa. Dr. Souvannaseng is particularly interested in state-capital market interactions in the financialization of infrastructure and South-South asymmetric dependency. You can read more about her research here.

She has held a Mansfield-Luce Asia Scholar Fellowship (2020 – 2022) and was a Wilson Center China Fellow (2021-2022). Dr Souvannaseng has also been an APSA Asia Scholar and Non-Resident Fellow at the East West Center, Washington DC. She is a Research Affiliate of the Centre for Crisis Studies & Mitigation at the University of Manchester. Her research has been funded by Fulbright, Japan Foundation and UKRI grants.

She believes in the importance and value of cross-disciplinary research in addressing developmental and environmental challenges. She has served as a researcher at the UN Research Institute for Social Development where she helped launch the UNRISD Flagship Report 2010. Pon has also served as a researcher for the ASEAN Labour Secretariat. She has served as a member of the Executive Committee and Reviews Editor for the Association for Southeast Asian Studies (UK) and currently serves as a Network B organizer for the Society of the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics.