Welcome! I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Emory University. I am on the academic job market in Fall 2026.

My research examines the everyday reproduction of nationalism. I investigate how states and cultural intermediaries embed political messages in popular culture, and how audiences interpret these cues to judge moral worth and draw symbolic boundaries of national belonging. My dissertation grounds this agenda in China’s entertainment sector, where the state co-opts celebrities to amplify official narratives. Drawing on in-depth interviews, survey experiments, and archival research, I trace both cultural production and reception: how entertainers perform nationalism, and how audiences evaluate these performances, punishing transgression and marking who belongs to the nation.

My research has been published in the American Sociological Review and Social Problems. My second-year paper on the audience reception of celebrity-mediated nationalism won Best Graduate Student Paper awards from the ASA’s Sociology of Culture, Social Psychology, and Asia and Asian America sections. My dissertation has been funded by the Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the OYCF-Chow Fellowship.

I received a B.A. in Sociology and Translation from the University of Hong Kong. I am a first-generation-to-college student.