I am the Hong Kong Director of the Yale-China Association, which is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that has longtime affiliations with Yale University, New Asia College, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My office is in the Cheng Ming Building of New Asia College. As Hong Kong Director, I wear many hats: I represent Yale-China in the vibrant New Asia College community, I frequently travel to China to help guide programs with Yale-China’s partner institutions in various provinces, and I remain active as a scholar, writing articles and teaching one course each year for the sociology department of CUHK.

I earned my Ph.D. at Yale University in the Department of Sociology, where my doctoral thesis was recognized for “Best Dissertation” in 2014. I also have an M.A. in Chinese religious studies from Indiana University and a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Wesleyan University. I studied Mandarin in Beijing, Japanese in Kyoto, and Tibetan in northern India. I have worked in the global nonprofit and social movements sector for over a decade.

In scholarship, I am especially interested in the intersection of politics and culture. My first book, forthcoming at Cambridge University Press, Making Activists in Global China, is about Chinese protest movements carried out overseas since the 1980s. More recently, I have done research on Hong Kong, including a chapter coming out soon in the book, The Civil Sphere in East Asia. My interests and teaching experiences are diverse, including classical and contemporary social theory, gender, religion, contentious politics, and stratification.

Prior to coming to CUHK and the Yale-China Association, I taught for four years at the University of Chicago and one and half years at the liberal arts college of Valparaiso University. Students in my class at CUHK will need to be willing to think theoretically as well as practically and empirically. My course about social movements will focus on political protest movements. I will cover some major theoretical positions and also give students a sociological tool box suited to understanding Hong Kong’s unique context today.