Welcome
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. I received my M.A. in Political Science from Duke University and my B.A. in Political Science from Wuhan University.
My research studies religious organizations as structures of authority and their relationship to political power, with a primary regional focus on China. I ask how large political and economic disruptions reshape a religious field, how religious minorities survive and grow under hostile regimes, and—running the relationship in reverse—how the way a religious body organizes authority shapes what its members come to expect of political and civic institutions. Alongside this agenda, I develop methods for measuring sensitive attitudes and behavior under authoritarian rule. My work draws on experiments, natural experiments, large-scale digital and archival data, and fieldwork.
My dissertation book project, Surviving and Reviving: Religion and Politics in Authoritarian China, explains the puzzling rise of Protestant Christianity in China; a chapter from the project won the Best Student Paper Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. My research has appeared in the Journal of Democracy. I will be on the academic job market in the 2026–27 academic year.
Dissertation committee: Xiaobo Lü and John Gerring (co-chairs), Kenneth F. Greene, Amy Liu, Anna Grzymała-Busse, and Fenggang Yang.