Helen Siu
Professor Helen Siu is a member of the AsiaGlobal Fellows Faculty Committee and a Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. She graduated from Carleton College, and received her PhD from Stanford University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Williams College, she joined Yale in 1982. She has assumed diverse administrative roles, including Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies, Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies for Anthropology, and member of the Social Science Divisional Committee in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Since the 1970s, she has conducted fieldwork in South China and Hong Kong, exploring agrarian change, the nature of the state, and the refashioning of identities through community rituals and commerce. She is presently exploring rural-urban interface in China, historical and contemporary Asian connections, and China-Africa encounters. Her current teaching interests are political and historical anthropology, hubs and global fluidities, and qualitative research design.
Professor Siu has served on numerous funding and research assessment committees at institutions in the United States and Europe. She chaired the International Advisory Board of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany (2014-2016). She was an overseas member of the University Grants Committee (1992-2001) and the Research Grant’s Council (1996-2001) in Hong Kong, for which she received the Bronze Bauhinia Star. She sits on the advisory board of the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and on an expert panel for the Ministry of Education in Singapore. In 2001, she established the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (www.hkihss.hku.hk), which highlights cross-disciplinary, inter-regional research, and promotes global collaborations.
Her recent publications include Asia Inside Out: Changing Times; Asia Inside Out: Connected Places (co-editors Eric Tagliacozzo and Peter Perdue, Harvard University Press, 2015), and Tracing China: A Forty year Ethnographic Journey (Hong Kong University Press, 2016).
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