Megan Maxwell is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago, where she studies the foreign policy of small states in Asia. Her work asks how states that are not the most powerful player in their region nonetheless shape the institutions and orders that govern it.

Her dissertation reexamines the founding of Southeast Asia's regional institutions to show that smaller states turned the very definition of Southeast Asia into an instrument of statecraft. By proposing an organization built around "Southeast Asia" instead of "the Pacific" or "Asia-Pacific," proposing states could signal preferences around who the biggest state in the institution should be, and which states should be kept out. Working from regional newspaper archives and government records, she reconstructs how the strategic priorities of Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand shifted in response to a changing environment. She then traces how far each shift shaped the preferences and proposals that laid the groundwork for the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASA) and, later, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

This sits within a broader agenda on how the foreign-policy histories of small Asian states shape the strategies they use as the region navigates renewed US–China competition and ongoing debates over ASEAN's role. A related project examines Singapore's negotiating tactics during Britain's withdrawal from Southeast Asia.

Before beginning her Ph.D., Megan spent a year as a Junior Fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Global Studies from Temple University, and earlier served seven years as a soldier in the U.S. Army, including a deployment to Afghanistan. Her interest in how states act within deeply asymmetric power relationships grew out of that earlier work in security and policy.