Helen F. Siu, is a Professor of Anthropology and former chair of the Council on East Asian Studies. She has conducted decades of fieldwork in Southern China, exploring agrarian change and commerce, the nature of the socialist state, and the refashioning of identities. Lately, she explores rural-urban interface in China, inter-Asian connections, China-Africa encounters, popular music and new political space in Hong Kong. She has served funding and research assessment committees in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She is the founding director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. It highlights cross-disciplinary research and global collaborations (www.hkihss.hku.hk). Her recent publications are Asia Inside Out (3 volumes, Harvard U Press 2015, 2019); Tracing China: A Forty year Ethnographic Journey (HKU Press 2016), “China-Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (Nov 2017), and “Financing China’s Engagements in Africa: New State Spaces along a Variegated Landscape” Africa 89 (4), 2019.
Selected Publications:
Asia Inside Out: Itinerant People (Co-editors Eric Tagliacozzo and Peter Perdue, Harvard University Press 2019)
Tracing China: A Forty Year Ethnographic Journey (Hong Kong University Press 2016)
Asia Inside Out: Connected Places (co-eds. Eric Tagliacozzo and Perdue Perdue; Harvard University Press 2015)
Asia Inside Out: Changing Times (co-editors Eric Tagliacozzo and Perdue Perdue; Harvard University Press 2015)
Merchants’ Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China (Hong Kong University Press 2010)
Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (co-editors Pamela Kyle Crossley and Donald S. Sutton; University of California Press 2006)
Furrows: Peasants, Intellectuals and the State (ed., Stanford University Press 1990)
Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (Yale University Press 1989)