Professional Schools

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• Chien-Chung HUANG
• Research Interests: international social work, nonprofit management and philanthropy, social welfare policy, poverty and welfare reform

Chien-Chung Huang (Ph.D., 1998, Social Work, Columbia University) is the director of Huamin Research Center and a professor in the School of Social Work at Rutgers University. His research emphasizes on the role of social welfare policy in affecting the well-being of children and their families both domestically and internationally. He has also investigated the effects of domestic violence on victims and their children. In recent years, he has focused on effects of nonprofit sector and philanthropy on social development. He has co-edited four books, and published more than 60 articles in peer-review journals.

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• Mingwei LIU
• Research Interests: comparative employment relations and human resource management with a focus on China

Mingwei Liu is Professor of Employment Relations and Founding-Director of the Center for Global Work and Employment at Rutgers. His research interests fall into three broad areas. The first is comparative employment relations and human resource management with a focus on Chinese employment relations, labor movement, human resource management, and labor and human resource issues in overseas Chinese multinational companies. The second is high performance work practices in different industries and national contexts. The third is labor standards and corporate social responsibility in global value chains. His publications appear in top industrial relations journals such as Industrial and Labor Relations Review, British Journal of Industrial Relations, and numerous edited books. He has also published a book (co-edited with Chris Smith), China at Work: A Labor Process Perspective on the Transformation of Work and Employment in China. His research has won several prestigious national and international awards such as the John T. Dunlop Scholar Award (2014), the Early Career Research Award of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research (2014), the Thomas A. Kochan and Stephen R. Sleigh Best Dissertation Award of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (2010), and the Early Career Fellowship Award of the Cardiff Business School (2010). In 2015 Professor Liu was selected as Chancellor's Scholar at Rutgers.

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• Nancy Yunhwa RAO
• Research Interests: gender and music, sketch studies, music modernism, cultural fusion in music, racial representations, and the music history of early Chinese Americans

Nancy Yunhwa Rao has produced award-winning research on a range of topics, including gender and music, sketch studies, music modernism, cultural fusion in music, racial representations, and the music history of early Chinese Americans.

Her publications have provided innovative analytical approaches to cross-cultural music, and enhanced public discussions about cultural encounter in music. Through her scholarship, as well as teaching, she has promoted diversity and advanced knowledge and dialogue about the complexity of diversity issues in music scholarship.   

Her book, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (Illinois University Press, 2017), tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. Its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities. It received Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society; Lowens Book Award, Society for American Music; and Book Award in Humanities and Cultural Studies, Associations for Asian American Studies.

As a music theorist, Rao has explored intersections between China and the West, in particular global perspectives in contemporary Chinese music. She has published on the use of music gestures, vocal style, and percussion patterns of Beijing opera in contemporary music by composers of Chinese origin.  She also received NEH Research Fellowship and ACLS Scholar in China Fellowship for this project. Her study on the American composer, Ruth Crawford, won her a national award of best article in American music published in 2007 from the Society for American Music. She has continued in the direction of sketch studies, for which her publication can be found in Music Theory Spectrum, as well as Carter Studies Online.

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• News:
• Nancy Rao received the Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research
• Nancy Yunhwa Rao received NEH fellowship

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• Tanja Sargent
• Research Interests: student-centered pedagogical and curricular reform in China

Tanja Sargent is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. Her research explores the tensions between student-centered pedagogical and curricular reform in China in the context of two important barriers: the ever-present and increasing pressure for competition in the National College Entrance Examination, and the long-held cultural attitudes supporting teacher and text-centered methods. She employs a variety of methods-including analyses of large scale survey data, qualitative in-depth interview and observation data, and content analysis of textual materials at multiple levels of analysis: policy, school, teacher, student, household and curricular materials. She teaches courses in the sociocultural foundations of education, comparative education and education in modern China.

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• News:
• Tanja Sargent becomes a new co-editor of the journal, Chinese Education and Society
• A Conversation with Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, on China

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• Mi SHIH
• Research Interests: urban planning in China in the post-reform era

Mi Shih is an associate professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. Professor Shih’s research focuses on the intersection of urbanization, displacement, and community-based planning in China. She uses in-depth ethnographic fieldwork research methods to examine how urban projects shape ordinary people’s livelihoods, power relations with the state, and communities in China. Her recent fieldwork in peri-urban Guangzhou especially focuses on the history and spatiality of the city’s very distinctive landscape, locally called “quanyajiaocuo” (犬牙交错, roughly equivalent to “interlocking” in English). This local idiom describes the coexistence of a highly urbanized, modernized landscape on state-owned (urban) land and a highly fragmented, vernacular landscape on collective-owned (village) land. Her current projects examine several important questions about Guangzhou’s peri-urban transformation: 1) the process of land expropriation that has given rise to the landscape of “quanyajiaocuo” in Guangzhou, 2) how we might critically reconceptualize displacement as a phenomenon that need not be bracketed by the narrow spatial understanding of ‘‘physical uprootedness,’’ but a process of in situ marginalization and dispossession, 3) the impact of rapid urbanization on villagers’ traditional customs, social relationships, and their imagery of the urban life they desire.

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