Anthropology

Shuting Zhuang received her B.A. from the University of Hong Kong with a concentration on comparative literature and sociology. Her undergraduate thesis was on the volunteerism of NGOs in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan. Her research interests include ethnicity, volunteerism, and modernization with a focus on the anthropological study of moral experience in transition periods in China.

Yu-chi Chang is currently a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Sport Sciences, Waseda University, Japan. She obtained her BA in Anthropology from National Taiwan University in 2006. She obtained her MA from the Graduate Institute of Sports & Leisure Management, National Taiwan Normal University in 2008. Her research interests include ethnic dance and socio-cultural aspects of health and the female body. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the localization of belly dance in Taiwan. She explores how Confucian values influence the belly dancing experience of Taiwanese women. Furthermore, she aims at comparing the healthy benefits of belly dancing interpreted by women from different cultural backgrounds.

Wu Xu studies foodways, ethnoecology, and ethnicity in central China. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Alberta and is the author of Farming, Cooking and Eating Practices in the Central China Highlands (Edwin Mellen Press, 2011). Currently, he is working on a project entitled Hezha Foods in Central China: Culture, Biopolicy and Botanical Diversity.

Song Ping received her Ph.D. in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the University of Amsterdam. Since 2006 she has been Professor of Anthropology at Xiamen University. Her teaching focuses on globalization and anthropology, modern China and Chinese culture. She is Director of the Research Center for Chinese Studies at Xiamen University, and has been a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore (2010) and the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands (2004-05). Her most recent research projects are ‘”The cultural Southeast” and transnational Chinese social practices’, and ‘Cultural subjectivity in globalization: transnational social practices of immigrant communities’. While at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, she will work on a project entitled Exploring Local Knowledge and Practice: New Migration and the Question of Modernity.

Soon-Yong Pak is Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. Dr. Pak is an anthropologist specializing in anthropology of education and currently teaches related subjects as well as courses on qualitative research methodology. He has carried out several fieldwork and research projects in Korea and Turkey. He has published a number of papers on the social history of schooling as well as the cultural dimensions of education in his regions of interest. His ongoing research interests involve the changing social landscape of Korean society and how the education sector is affected as it moves toward a multicultural setting. His more recent research projects involve North Korean refugees, foreign migrant workers, multicultural families, and native English teachers in Korea. During his stay at Harvard-Yenching Institute, he hopes to complete his thesis on the academic resilience of school-aged North Korean refugees by utilizing data collected through narrative inquiry.

Dr. Chen Bo received his PhD from Peking University and currently teaches anthropology at Sichuan University. He has been a visiting scholar at UNC and Duke (2005-2006), and an Asian Scholar (2007-2009, Thailand). Dr. Chen speaks and reads Tibetan, and his work mainly focuses on Tibetan studies. His research interests include the history of Chinese anthropology on Tibetan studies, historical anthropology, kinship, civilization studies, and cross-area comparisons.  His recent publications include Reproducing Shambala (2009), Li An-che and the West-China School of Anthropology (2010), and An Ethnography of Lo Yul, Nepal (2011).

Ngô Thị Thanh Tâm is a researcher at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Gottingen, Germany. She received a Ph.D in Anthropology from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research topics include the recent Protestant Conversion among the Hmong in Northern Vietnam, the social memory of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war in China and Vietnam, and the unfolding of Cold War politics in the experience of the Northern and Southern Vietnamese in Berlin, Germany. As a fellow in the Coordinate Research Program under the guidance of Professor Hue Tam Ho Tai, she will be working on her book manuscript title “Sex, Soul, Spirits: Becoming Protestant Hmong in Contemporary Vietnam.”.

Seung-Mi Han is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies and Anthropology at the Graduate School of International Studies, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. Her current research interests are citizenship, nationality, and globalization as well as the culture industry in the information age. She has written on late Meiji colonial travel writing, politics of identity in a Japanese local industry, consumption of Japanese culture in contemporary Korea, politics and ethos of the New Community Movement during the South development era, and humanitarian aid to North Korea by South Korean NGOs.