Department Welcomes Three New Professors

Welcome to the start of the new academic year! This fall, the Department of Anthropology is delighted to welcome three new faculty members, whose diverse expertise will enhance course offerings and expand the scope of research of the department. Browse the profiles below to learn more about them, including their research and educational interests.

CHENG Sea Ling (Associate Professor, Ph.D. University of Oxford) 

Prof. Sealing Cheng received her doctorate from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University. She was then a Rockefeller postdoctoral fellow in Gender, Sexuality, Health, and Human Rights at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. In January 2005, she began teaching at Wellesley College in the US. Her research is focused on sexuality with reference to sex work, human trafficking, women’s activism, and policy-making. Her book, On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (University of Pennsylvania Press 2010) received the Distinguished Book Award of the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association in 2012. 

Areas of Interest:Sex work, human trafficking, women’s activism, and policy-making, HIV/AIDS campaigns and policies, The Vagina Monologues and transnational feminism, the politics of representation in anti-trafficking discourses, pedagogical issues in women's and gender studies and Asian studies.

Geographical Areas of Research: South Korea, Hong Kong SAR.

Languages: Cantonese, English, Korean

HUANG Yu (Assistant Professor, Ph.D. University of Washington) 

Prof. Huang Yu's research concerns China in global context, the politics of knowledge production, labor value, and the governance of risks. She received Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle with her dissertation entitled "Vibrant Risks: Scientific Aquaculture and Political Ecologies in China," examining how the dissemination of science in shrimp aquaculture is intertwined with issues of sustainability and risks in south China. Using methodologies developed in Science and Technology Studies to study laboratory scientists, she adapted these to the study of field science to examine how the science and technology of disease control and food safety standardization might generate new risks. While predicated on excluding the observed pathogens and hazards, these technologies disregarded the vitalities of unobservables. She observes how forms of nonhuman agency emerge from developmental schemes pushing for high-intensity production by looking at the complex dynamics between the biological materiality of the shrimp species themselves, the emergence of new pathogens, and the innovation of pharmaceutical technologies as a means of "crisis management" that mimic the increasingly unstable conditions of global capital accumulation.

Areas of Interest: Science and Technology Studies (STS), labor studies, governmentality, environmental anthropology, agrarian studies.

Geographical Areas of Research: Mainland China.

Languages: English, Cantonese, Putonghua, Hakka, and Minnan

Teresa KUAN (Assistant Professor, Ph.D. University of Southern California) 

Prof. Teresa Kuan majored in Anthropology at UC Berkeley and received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Southern California at the end of 2008. She was originally trained in medical anthropology but has since then become interested in expertise as a cultural phenomenon. She is currently working on a book project that examines the intersection between popular childrearing advice and the lived experience of parenting amongst urban, middle-class families in China. She situates this project in relation to broader questions concerning moral experience and the government of human subjectivity. Dr. Kuan was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Whittier College between 2009-2011, and a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow between 2011-2012. She joined the Department of Anthropology at CUHK in the Fall of 2012.

Areas of Interest: Anthropology of China, childhood studies, psychological anthropology, medical anthropology.

Geographical Areas of Research: Mainland China.

Languages: English, Putonghua