Julia Chuang is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She is a qualitative researcher with research interests in development, agrarian politics, and migration. Her work has utilized ethnographic and interview-based methods, and recently, she has also begun to work with computational methods as well. Julia completed her postdoctoral training at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She received a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in Social Studies from Harvard University.
Julia’s research uses predominantly qualitative methods to investigate trends in global migration, development and transnational capital flows. One line of inquiry looks into burgeoning land markets in rural China, where land expropriation has become a leading source of popular grievances. A second area of research examines the evolution of a ‘market’ for migration through the global emergence of investment migration schemes.
Her book, Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market, published in 2020 by University of California Press, won multiple awards from the ASA. Other pieces have also been published in Politics & Society, Gender & Society, Journal of Peasant Studies, and The China Quarterly.