Xuefei Ren

Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Urban Studies

Xuefei Ren received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago and joined the MSU faculty in 2007. Her research interests include urbanization, governance, development, architecture and the built environment, cultural industries, globalization, and state transformations. Author of Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (2011, University of Chicago Press) and co-translator of Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (2011, Tokyo: Harvest, with Matumoto), she is currently working on her second book Urban China/Gilded Age (forthcoming, Polity), which offers fresh new perspectives on how China has become urban and what it means to the world. She has been selected as a fellow by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and will be based in Washington, DC in 2011-2012 working on her next project on The Changing Urban Governance in China and India, 1980s-2010s. She offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses on urban transformations, development, inequality, globalization, China, and India. At the graduate level, she teaches social theory, cultural sociology, and the proseminar on globalization and structural inequalities; at the undergraduate level, she offers courses on urban sociology, developing societies, China and globalization, and social change. She puts strong emphases on interdisciplinary, international, and comparative approaches in her research and teaching.

She has published in a variety of journals including City and Community, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Journal of Urban Affairs, and CITY, among others. She has received numerous fellowships and awards. The most recent ones include fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, American Sociological Association, the National University of Singapore, the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong, Center for Advanced Studies in International Development (CASID) and IRGP at MSU. She is a corresponding editor for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and the International Urban Planning Review.

Research Interests

• Urban development & politics, urban governance, globalization, architecture and built environment, cultural industries, state restructuring, cities in China and India

Areas of Specialization: Urban, Race and Migration

Subareas: Development, Economic, Globalization, Governance, Political, Urban