Dr. Paige Johnson Tan is a Consultant with Sea-Change Partners and an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington where she teaches undergraduate courses in Comparative Politics and International Relations along with graduate courses in Public Administration. Dr. Tan completed her Ph.D. in Foreign Affairs, specializing in Comparative Politics and Southeast Asia, at the University of Virginia (UVa). Her dissertation was titled “Streams of Least Resistance: the Institutionalization of Political Parties and Democracy in Indonesia.” Dr. Tan has contributed articles on Indonesian politics to Contemporary Southeast Asia, the Jakarta Post, the Van Zorge Report on Indonesia, and the Daily Yomiuri (Japan). In addition, she published a study of East Timor’s political parties as a chapter in a forthcoming book entitled Double Transition in East Timor: The Consolidation of Sovereignty and Democracy (Paulo Gorjao, ed.).
Dr. Tan has been an invited speaker on Indonesian politics at conferences and events sponsored by several government agencies, including the U.S. State Department. From 2000 to 2002, Dr. Tan served as a consultant to the API Foundation, Jakarta, working on issues related to the construction of democratic institutions in Indonesia. In 2000, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Economic and Social Research (LPEM) at the University of Indonesia. From 1998-1999, she worked for the Harvard Institute for International Development as a Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her project, the development of the Public Policy Program at NUS, was designed to increase human resource capacity in governance in the Southeast Asian region.
Dr. Tan has a Master’s Degree in International Public Administration (International Development) from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She is a former Fulbright scholar who speaks Indonesian, French, Chinese, and German.