Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

In Shanghai, Guo is going to finish his dissertation on the history of Chinese political elites and the development of state capacity. Several important scholars who share the same research interests are working in academic institutions in the Shanghai region, and so the fellowship will present him with opportunities to exchange ideas with scholars in his field. He will also be conducting archival research to collect historical data needed for his dissertation. As these are in the Shanghai area, he is looking forward to collecting  the data that required to complete this research.

Professor Jung’s research seeks to better understand how elective pricing operates in influencing consumer behavior. In a series of field and lab experiments, she has been investigating the psychological variables that explain the generosity of consumers under pay-what-you-want pricing. But there are still a number of unanswered questions about what contributes to such generosity and what sustains such behavior. Professor Jung is interested in working with Chinese companies to test how a different cultural system can engender or discourage generosity in elective pricing systems. Professor Jung is also interested in conducting field experiments to replicate the behaviors we have seen in the USA and in China to test the robustness of social preferences across different cultures.

Fan Zhang’s dissertation, entitled "Cultural Encounters: Ethnic Complexity and Material Expression in 5th century Pingcheng, China," addresses the issue of identity in the ancient world through an investigation into material remains left by people of divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds. This research project focuses on the city of Pingcheng, one of the capitals of Northern Wei Dynasty (386-535 CE), a regime established by a non-Han ethnic group called Xianbei. During the course of the 5th century, more than one million immigrants and travelers arrived in Pingcheng from the Eurasian steppes in the north, the Korean Peninsula in the northeast, Central Asia in the west, and the regions ruled by Han Chinese in the south. The multiple waves of mass migration brought people of diverse backgrounds together and created an unusually fertile ground for vigorous cultural exchanges. Zhang’s research is intended to articulate how material culture served as an effective vehicle for an individual to express his or her newly found identity in a multi-ethnic society. Methodologically, this project takes an interdisciplinary approach that calls for analytical skills in art history, archaeology, and history. While at NYU Shanghai Zhang will conduct research on ancient China and on the issue of cultural interaction. She plans to access to publications in Chinese and work with professors and specialists at the Center of Global Asia, whose vision on connections and communications will be an asset to her research project. 

Existing research on educational inequality has largely focused on how students who lack the cultural capital that function in schools, fall behind. Fewer studies have examined how teachers may be intentionally or unintentionally evaluating students based on these dominant cultural norms. If beliefs matter for teacher practices and those practices have significant impacts on student outcomes, it is important to consider the ways in which educational environments can influence teachers, in not only the expectations they set, but also in the ways in which they evaluate their students. Using restricted data from large national probability education surveys and multi-level methods of analyses, Kim’s current research explores and expands upon research that looks at the influence of school composition on teachers’ evaluations of student academic effort and student outcomes. Understanding how and in what ways school structures may be influencing teacher behaviors is an important factor to consider in understanding educational inequality.