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About Me
I am a social science researcher, teacher, writer, and editor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS), Waseda University, Japan.
I grew up in Changsha, Hunan, China, and later studied and worked across China, the United States, and Japan. Moving between these places has shaped not only my academic interests, but also how I understand education, belonging, inequality, and international exchange.
I received my Ph.D. training at the Center for International Higher Education (CIHE) at Boston College, USA, under the mentorship of Professors Hans de Wit and Philip G. Altbach. Their scholarship taught me to see higher education as more than a sector or policy field. Universities are places where global inequality, national ambition, intellectual exchange, and individual lives meet. That perspective continues to guide my work.
My research begins with international higher education, but reaches into broader questions about the politics of knowledge. I am interested in how knowledge, talent, and academic collaboration move across borders, and how these movements are shaped by institutions, national strategies, geopolitical tensions, and unequal global structures.
Much of my current work focuses on East Asia, especially China, Japan, and Korea. I study how universities and researchers navigate a world in which international collaboration remains deeply necessary, but is also increasingly entangled with competition, security concerns, and political mistrust.
Research Interests
My research examines the political economy and geopolitics of knowledge production through three interconnected themes:
Knowledge diplomacy and the geopolitics of science
How universities, researchers, and international collaborations contribute to diplomacy, competition, and regional relations.
The internationalization of higher education
How internationalization is understood and practiced differently across national and institutional contexts, and how universities balance educational, political, and organizational goals.
International mobility and personal transformation
How students and scholars experience migration, mobility, identity, belonging, and change across cultural and institutional boundaries.
These interests have grown out of both research and lived experience. I have benefited enormously from education across borders, but I have also become increasingly aware that international exchange is never entirely neutral. It can open possibilities, create relationships, and transform lives, while also reproducing hierarchy, exclusion, and unequal access.
I do not believe that one scholar, one theory, or one country can provide adequate answers to these questions. I hope my research can contribute, in a modest way, to a more honest understanding of global academic relations—and to forms of international cooperation that are more inclusive, reciprocal, and humane.
I am always glad to hear from researchers, students, and practitioners who are thinking about similar questions, especially across disciplinary and regional boundaries.
Outside Academia
I am an enthusiastic consumer and habitual analyzer of Sci-Fi and popular culture.
I love Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing, especially An Artist of the Floating World and A Pale View of Hills. His quiet attention to memory, silence, and the fragile stories people tell about their own lives has influenced the way I think about my work. I keep returning to the question of how history and political change enter individual lives—how they are felt, interpreted, remembered, and lived.
Living near Waseda, I read Haruki Murakami, who once walked some of the same streets. I do not always understand what is happening in his novels, but I enjoy wandering through their strange worlds, and occasionally recognizing a few familiar streets along the way.
Sometimes, I disappear into The Legend of Zelda. I avoid fighting the monsters because I am much happier just riding across Hyrule and collecting every Korok. It is less a game to complete than a quiet place to roam.
The rest of my time is spent walking around Shinjuku Gyoen with my family and friends and growing flowers.
Lilies, roses, and Persian buttercups bring me the most joy.
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