Speakers
Ning is a PhD student in the Department of Politics at New York University. His research interests are comparative politics and historical political economy. Before coming to NYU, he completed an MPhil in social science at HKUST, a bachelor and a master's degree in public administration at Fudan University. Ning's recent research focuses on state violence, bureaucracy, and military mobilization in civil and international conflicts. In his research, he draws historical and contemporary data at the micro-level to answer general theoretical questions about politics.
I am the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences in the department of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. My research centers on the political economy of non-democracies, with a regional focus on China. I am interested in how individual actors (e.g., citizens, firms) interact with the state and state agents that are not held accountable by elections, and how these interactions affect outcomes such as economic growth, government service, quality of institutions, and policy changes.
Siyun Jiang is a PhD student in the Department of Government in the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are comparative political economy and judicial politics, with a regional focus on China. She received M.Phil in Social Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and B.A. in Sociology from Sun Yat-sen University.
Email: syjiang@utexas.edu
Handi Li is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Emory University. Her research focuses on information politics and state-society relationships in autocracies, with regional expertise in China. Across various projects, she examines the causes and consequences of transparency and information manipulation. She also studies contentious politics and the political economy of development. Methodologically, her research employs formal modeling and statistical methods for causal inference that utilize observational data and experiments. She has conducted field surveys and interviews with underprivileged people in China. Her dissertation investigates why China develops transparency initiatives and how they shape citizens’ interaction with legal institutions and social contention.
I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Economics Department, University of Colorado Boulder. My research interests are Economic History and Political Economy. My current research examines collective actions, war, and social conflicts from an economic perspective. I'm also interested in nation-building, inequality, and technological spillover.
Zeren Li is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Leitner Program of Political Economy, MacMillan Center, Yale University. His research focuses on business-government relations, bureaucracy, good governance, and authoritarian politics with a regional interest in China. Methodologically, he is interested in the “Big Data” analysis of state-business relations. For his dissertation and other research projects, Zeren develops automated methods for collecting and matching extensive administrative data and create two original databases: the Chinese Revolving-Door Officials Database and the Chinese Public-Private Partnership Database. His research has been funded by institutions including National Science Foundation, Google Cloud Platform, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, and other research grants.
Cong Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Economic and Social Research at Jinan University. She received her PhD degree in Economics from the University of Arizona in 2016 and BA in Economics from Peking University in 2011. Her research interests are economic history, development economics, and political economy. She has published on various journals, including Journal of Economic History, Journal of Comparative Economics, and Economic Research Journal.
Lucie Lu is a PhD candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Department of Political Science. Her dissertation is about how autocrats use an information-based and responsive media strategy to impress the public. Scholars in authoritarian politics have primarily forgotten that the news media as a tool of persuasion for autocrats' political survival. Political communication scholars have been intrigued by autocrats’ crafty communication tactics to manipulate public opinion. Her dissertation searches for an intersection between these two vibrant fields.
Dan Mattingly is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. His research focuses on the politics of authoritarian regimes, historical political economy, and China. His book The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge, 2020) received the best book award from the Democracy and Autocracy Section of APSA, was the winner of the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize, and was named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Currently, he is working on a new book on the role of the military in elite politics in China.
Chaohong Pan
Chaohong Pan is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at University of California, Merced. Her research interests lie in the area of political psychology, comparative politics, authoritarianism, and China.
Jen Pan is an associate professor at Department of Communication at Stanford University. Her research focuses on political communication and authoritarian politics. She uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other authoritarian regimes to answer questions about how autocrats perpetuate their rule. How political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age. How preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result.
Assistant Professor in the NYU Department of Politics. During the 2020-21 academic year, she was a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. She study representation, accountability, and public service provision in state and local governments in the U.S. Her research has appeared in outlets such as The Journal of Politicsand The American Political Science Review and has received support from the National Science Foundation and the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. Julia's book When Cities Lobby (Oxford University Press, 2022) documents how local officials use lobbyists to compete for power in a political environment characterized by intense urban-rural polarization and growing hostility between cities and state legislatures.
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. I hold a PhD in Political Science (Duke, 2012) and MS in Statistical and Decision Sciences (Duke, 2010). In 2016-2017, I was a National Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford. My research focuses on building theoretical models of authoritarian politics and testing them using natural experiments, field experiments, and machine learning tools. I am especially interested in information manipulation through media, propaganda, and elections, as well as causes and consequences of state repression. My empirical work mostly covers Ukraine and Russia, and post-communist Europe more generally. At NYU, I teach courses on comparative politics and advanced statistical methods.
I am an Assistant Professor of in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. I write on the political economy of institutions and development. My current research focuses on the comparative study of bureaucracies and on research design. My work appears in journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others. My research has been supported by grants from the NSF, USAID, EGAP/DFID, J-PAL, and Innovations for Povery Action.
Lu Sun
Lu Sun is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M University. My research interests include international trade in goods and services, and foreign investment conflicts. I mainly focus on how international trade and foreign investment affect domestic citizens and shape domestic politics.
Email: lusun0318@tamu.edu
Rory Truex is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research focuses on Chinese politics and authoritarian systems. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, and The China Quarterly, and featured in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. In 2021 he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching honor at Princeton. He currently resides in Philadelphia.
Hannah Waight
Hannah Waight is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Social Media and Politics at NYU. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. Her research interests include the sociology of media and information, contemporary China, computational sociology, and the history of social thought. Her dissertation project investigates the scale and effects of news media control in China. She received an MA (2014) and BA (2010) in East Asian Studies, both from Harvard University.
Xu Xu is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Xu studies the politics of information, political repression, and the political economy of development with a regional focus on China. He is currently working on a book entitled Authoritarian Control in the Age of Digital Surveillance. His other ongoing projects examine public opinion on state repression in authoritarian regimes, propaganda and new media in China, and preference formation among Chinese citizens.
I am an assistant professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. I received my Ph.D from Harris School of Public Policy, the University of Chicago. My research interests are political economy, applied game theory, comparative politics and public policy.