Elena Atanassova-Cornelis is an Associate Professor in International Relations at the European School of Political and Social Sciences (ESPOL) of the Catholic University of Lille. She is also a part-time Professor of International Politics at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, an Associate Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) and a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) in Tallinn, Estonia.
Her teaching and research interests include international relations in East Asia and the Indo-Pacific with a particular focus on regional security, strategy and geopolitics, as well as Europe-Asia relations.
Previously, Elena Atanassova-Cornelis was a Professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, the Japan Chair at the ICDS in Tallinn, Estonia, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Kent in Brussels, and the Lille Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po Lille), France. She was also a Senior Associate Analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) in Paris, and a holder of the Taiwan Fellowship of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China on Taiwan. She was a recipient of the Monbusho Scholarship of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and pursued graduate studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. She holds a PhD in Japanese Studies from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.