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.
I am a comparativist working on religion and politics, with China as my primary regional focus and the United States as a second empirical setting. Three questions drive my research: how large political and economic disruptions reshape a society’s religious landscape, how religious groups navigate widespread social hostility, and how the way churches organize authority shapes whether their members trust important secular institutions in democracies. I have also developed a methodological interest in measuring sensitive attitudes and behavior under authoritarian regimes. My work draws on experiments, causal inference with observational data, large-scale digital data, archival research, 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, with a revise and resubmit at The China Quarterly. I am 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.