Xuefei Ren
- Professor
- Department of Sociology
- PhD, Sociology, University of Chicago
- 401C Berkey Hall
- 509 E. Circle Drive
- East Lansing, MI 48824
- 527-355-6644
- renxuefe@msu.edu
CURRICULUM VITAE
Xuefei RenBIOGRAPHY
Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist whose work explores urban governance and the built environment from a global perspective. She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Xuefei Ren is a Fellow in the Humanity’s Urban Future program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. She previously served as a Public Intellectual Fellow at the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations.
Her work examines how infrastructures, climate, and shifting power relations remake urban worlds across continents. Working comparatively across China, Europe, and North America, she leads research on AI infrastructure and urban futures, the revitalization of China’s rustbelt, the rise of climate boomtowns, and the political ecology of snow—tracing how geopolitics, climate risks, and local governance reorganize territories and produce new spatial disparities.
Her research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Urban Studies Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, among others.
ASSOCIATED PROGRAMS
- Asian Studies Center
- Global Urban Studies Program