Giovanna Maria Dora Dore

Giovanna Maria Dora Dore

Associate Teaching Professor
Director, East Asian Studies Program

Contact Information

Research Interests: Comparative politics, democratic legitimacy, authoritarian legacies, computational social science, East and Southeast Asia

Education: PhD, Johns Hopkins University

East Asian Studies > People > Giovanna Maria Dora Dore

Giovanna Maria Dora Dore is a Political Economist with 20+ years of experience in international development and comparative politics, with a focus on institutions and public policy in East Asian emerging markets. Dr Dore's education, scholarship and professional experiences afforded the opportunity to live, study and work in Asia, Europe, and North America. 

Between 1998 and 2008, Dr. Dore worked at the World Bank in various capacities, including Special Assistant to the President. Her work focused on the East Asia and Pacific Region and a broad range of topics related to growth and sustainable development, public expenditure and revenue management, and decentralization. Dr. Dore designed and managed analytical research programs, technical assistance initiatives, development policy lending, and traditional investment lending for China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Earlier on, between 1990 and 1995, she worked on migration and refugees’ issues with a focus on Pakistan, Middle Eastern and European countries in the context of her association with the United Nations. On ad hoc basis, Dr Dore serves as Expert Policy Advisor for governments and NGOs.

Dr Dore joined the Program in East Asian Studies of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at JHU in 2018 where she teaches political economy courses with a focus on East Asia, and conduct research on comparative politics, democratic legitimacy and authoritarian legacies in East Asia. She is the Co-founder of the Cassandra Project(cassandra.cs.jhu.edu) that focuses on furthering computational innovation for the social sciences, an Advisor to the JHU-SAIS MAGP Program, a Fellow with the JHU-SAIS Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies and is affiliated to the Center for Advancing Women in Economics at the Federal Reserve Bank. Previous academic affiliations include the American University-SIS in Washington DC. 

Dr. Dore is the principal author of A Free Press, If You Can Keep It: What Natural Language Processing Reveals About Freedom of the Press in Hong Kong (with Arya D. McCarthy and James A. Scharf) by Springer Nature 2023; the Sole author of Asia Struggles with Democracy, Routledge 2016; and Principal contributor and Editor (with Karl D. Jackson and Jae H. Ku) of Incomplete Democracies in Asia-Pacific, Palgrave Macmillan 2014. She has authored peer-reviewed articles on democratic legitimacy and dysfunction in East Asia and Europe, authoritarian legacies in East Asia, and growth, development and aid in emerging markets and transition economies. Her computational research has been featured in the archival conferences of the Association for Computational Linguistics with her position paper on Theory-Grounded Computational Text Analysis received an honorable mention. Dr Dore's commentary has appeared in The American Interest magazine.

Dr. Dore received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University - SAIS in 2012, her MA in in International Relations and International Economics from the Johns Hopkins University – SAIS in 1998, and her BA-MSc in Contemporary Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (double first-class honors) from the Catholic University of Milan in 1995.