University of Wisconsin-Madison

Faculty Member, Sociology

Other Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, KoGuan Law School

Assistant Professor of Sociology and Law

College of Letters and Science

About

I am a sociologist specializing in law and society, sociology of professions, and contemporary Chinese society, with broad interests in social theory and qualitative/historical methods. I have a law degree from Peking University (2002) and a Ph.D. degree in sociology from the University of Chicago (2009). Now I am Assistant Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am also Research Fellow at Shanghai Jiao Tong University KoGuan Law School.

My current research interests focus on the historical change, social structure, and political mobilization of the legal profession. In the past several years, I have conducted extensive research on the Chinese legal profession as an empirical case for understanding how social structures such as professions, market, and the state are produced by two general social processes, boundary-work and exchange. Meanwhile, I am also working on a collaborative project with Terence C. Halliday on the everyday work and political mobilization of Chinese lawyers in the criminal justice system. More recently, I started a project on lawyers and migration, examining how lawyers' inter-provincial migration has changed the social structure and stratification of the Chinese legal profession.

Methodologically, I am mostly interested in the shape of social structures and how they transform over time, and I use a combination of interviews, participant observation and archival research to investigate the various processes of social change in the legal system and beyond.

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