Dr. Krista Wiegand is Professor and Director of the Center for National Security and Foreign Affairs at the Howard J. Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs. She joined the UTK faculty as Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science in 2014 after nine years on the faculty at Georgia Southern University. She received her PhD in Political Science from Duke University in 2004 with concentrations in International Relations and Security Studies.

As Director of NSFA, she oversees funded research projects with faculty fellows and affiliates, graduate and undergraduate students, pursues policy engagement with government agencies and thinktanks, and provides public engagement on topics of national security and foreign affairs through workshops and hosting guest speakers.

Dr. Wiegand’s research covers territorial and maritime disputes, conflict resolution/management, war and militarized interstate disputes, U.S. national security policy, foreign policy strategies of countries in the Indo-Pacific region, focusing on Japan, China, South Korea, and the Philippines, and  international mediation, arbitration, and adjudication of interstate and civil conflicts.

She has published three books: Bombs and Bullets: Governance by Islamic Terrorist and Guerrilla Groups (Routledge, 2010) and Enduring Territorial Disputes: Strategies of Bargaining, Coercive Diplomacy, and Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2011), The Peaceful Resolution of Territorial and Maritime Disputes (Oxford University Press, 2023), book co-authored with Dr. Emilia Justyna Powell, and is co-editor of the book Islands of Contention: The China-Japan Border Dispute in a Multidisciplinary Perspective (Routledge, 2015). She is currently working on a book project with Dr. Sojeong Lee about the role of territorial and maritime disputes in the strategies of U.S. allies and partner countries in the Indo-Pacific region, in the context of the U.S.-China rivalry.