Yasmin Cho (she/her) is an Earl S. Johnson Lecturer in Anthropology in MAPSS. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. Before joining MAPSS, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.

Dr. Cho’s research interests include materiality, infrastructure, technology, ethnic politics, migration, gender, and anthropology of religion, as well as social theory and ethnography. Her areas of focus are China, Tibet, and sub-Saharan regions of Africa where China’s transnational presence is growing. Her work is dedicated to understanding, from an anthropological perspective, the role of materiality (including technology and infrastructure) in religious movements, with a special focus on gender politics and the formation of political subjectivity in ethnic minority groups. Her first book, Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet, forthcoming from Cornell University Press, explores the intersections of material practices, gender, and religious revivalism through the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns in post-Mao China and reveals the unexpected political outcomes of the nuns’ lives and practices within a restrictive political context.

Since 2021, Dr. Cho has been focusing on a Chinese-supported Buddhist NGO and its school-building activities in sub-Saharan African countries and recently completed two and a half years of field research in Namibia (including a few months in Madagascar). Her forthcoming article, “Mooring Buddhism: Infrastructure and Chinese School Building in Central Namibia,” in The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies reflects her most recent ethnographic work in Namibia and explores how Buddhism has become a form of infrastructure that supports China’s growing presence on the African continent. Her other publications have appeared in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Modern Asian Studies, and the edited volume Frontier Tibet: Patterns of Change in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.

Professor Yao's research focuses on the impact of the Han Empire’s conquest of frontier regions and seeks to explain the variable ways different communities and social classes responded to momentous changes in local history. Currently she is conducting an archaeological survey project in southwestern China, which aims to recover the settlement sites of a local Bronze Age polity known as the Dian before its incorporation by the Han Empire. This ongoing project investigates the genesis of the Dian polity in relation to control over bronze production and the regional trade network developing between China and Southeast Asia.

Professor Fisch's research focuses on the effects of technology, nature, and culture on Japanese society. He is currently developing a project that explores the emergence of what he identifies as “experimental ecologies” that work to contest, recast, and re-conceive disaster infrastructure design in post-3.11 Japan. 

Professor Chu is a social anthropologist who specializes in the economic effects of industrialization on Chinese culture. She also does ethnographic fieldwork focusing on Chinese urbanization and migration patterns.