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Jun ZHANG

Orcid profile

Personal webpage

Research Interests
Material Culture
Mobility and Infrastructure
Urban Development
Social Transformation

Visiting dates: August 25, 2025 – November 5, 2025

Jun ZHANG is a social-cultural anthropologist with a regional focus on China. With an interdisciplinary approach in her research, Dr. Zhang is interested in questions of social transformation, particularly the gaps, ambiguities, contradictions, and interactions between the grand narratives and mundane practices. Her research projects have two major focuses—urban middle class and material culture—through which she explore a wide range of topics from family making and ethical negotiation to urban transformation and techno-politics. She is the author of “Driving Toward Modernity. Cars and the Lives of the Middle Class in Contemporary China” (Cornell University Press, 2019) and multiple journal articles.