keywords: power, land, infrastructure, critical minerals, Global China
places: China, Southeast Asia, Laos, Tibet, Nepal, and North America
Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah and hold positions in the School of Environment, Society & Sustainability, the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program, and Asian Studies. I was a Public Intellectual Program Fellow of the National Committee on US-China Relations and a China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. In 2026, I received the Margaret FitzSimmons Early Career Award in Political Ecology (AAG).
My scholarship is anchored in China and spans Southeast & South Asia, and more recently North America. Before entering academia, I worked in NGO and education sectors and began working in China in 2008—experiences that continue to inform my approach to research as immersive, relational, and socially engaged. I use multi-sited, multi-scalar & multi-lingual methods, and am committed to connecting place-based analyses with broader global processes, particularly through ethnographic fieldwork. My research has been published in Dialogues in Human Geography, Nature Energy, Progress in Human Geography, Antipode, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Geoforum, Ecology and Society, Geopolitics, Area, Ambio, Extractive Industries and Society, Globalizations, and more, as well as in multiple books. I co-edited The Rise of the Infrastructure State (2022).
I'm invested in critical, collaborative, policy-relevant, and public-facing research. As an editorial board member of The People’s Map of Global China & Global China Pulse within Global China Lab, I help advance open-access, grounded analyses of China’s global engagements. I co-founded the Second Cold War Observatory, a collective of scholars dedicated to advancing historically and contextually situated understandings of US-China competition, and co-host its New Books Network podcast. I'm an affiliate of SGAIN (Sustainability Governance of China's Global Infrastructure Investments) and on the board of the Mekong Center for Research and Policy, and served as elected At-Large Councilor (2024-26) for the Cultural & Political Ecology (CAPE) specialty group of the American Association of Geographers.
Prior to joining the University of Utah, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia's Institute of Asian Research in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, a Global China Fellow at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, a Research Fellow at the University of Bern’s Centre for Development and Environment in Laos, a USAID Research and Innovations Fellow in India, and a Princeton-in-Asia Fellow in Dalian, China. I earned my Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and master's in Development at the University of California, Berkeley.
Beyond my research and teaching, I relish in movement, whether backpacking in the Himalayas, canyoneering in Utah, skiing with my huskies, or cycling (and eating) my way across Taiwan.
