Shelley Rigger is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College. She has a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and a B.A. in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University. She has been a Fulbright scholar at National Taiwan University (2019), a visiting researcher at National Chengchi University in Taiwan (2005), and a visiting professor at Fudan University (2006) and Shanghai Jiaotong University (2013 and 2015). She is a Non-Resident Fellow of the China Policy Institute at Nottingham University and a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). She is also a Director of The Taiwan Fund, a closed-end investment fund specializing in Taiwan-listed companies.
Rigger is the author of two books on Taiwan’s domestic politics, Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (Routledge, 1999) and From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001). She has published two books for general readers, Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse (2011) and The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China’s Economic Rise (2021). She has published articles on Taiwan’s domestic politics, the national identity issue in Taiwan-China relations and related topics. In 2019-2020, she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar based in Taipei, where she worked on a study of Taiwan’s contributions to the People’s Republic of China’s economic take-off and a study of Taiwanese youth.
