I have been an assistant professor at Duke Kunshan University since fall 2018, after obtaining a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology from Brandeis University at the same year. At DKU, my teaching focuses on the anthropology of home, house, and housing, development studies, and the social science studies of China and beyond. My primary research interests include economic anthropology, urban anthropology, political economy, the social studies of the market, science and technology studies, housing, urban studies, and China. I have published research articles on the topics of urban governance, urban accumulation, as well as the social construction of the housing market in China. My book project (under review), titled “Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China’s Housing Market” explores homeownership ideologies developed in urban China in the past two decades, through an ethnography of a low-end housing market at the urban fringe of east Nanjing, southeast China (long-term stay from 2013 to 2015, short field trips conducted in 2012 and 2019). In the book, I show how government officials, developers, realtors, and homebuyers and sellers built the local housing market from the bottom up. I am particularly interested in how certain economic concepts help to bring actors together and allow for capital accumulation in the urban process.
