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About
Yuan Zhang is a Research Fellow at the LSE–Fudan Global Public Policy Hub in the Department of Social Policy.
She completed her DPhil in Anthropology at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Oxford, alongside a Master’s degree in Global Affairs and a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Tsinghua University.
Yuan’s doctorate explored care, futurity, and spiritual practices through the lens of built environments in rural China. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork in North China, her research examined how people navigate religious encounters, socio-economic transformations, and uncertain futures through houses, tombs, and fengshui practices. Her work has been published in Anthropology Today (2023) and Roadsides (2024).
Currently, Yuan is developing a book manuscript and expanding research into two areas: housing, infrastructure, and social policy in China; the intersection of spirituality and technology.
Yuan’s teaching encompasses social anthropology and China studies. At Oxford, she has taught on anthropological theory, cultural representations, society-culture-environment relations, and contemporary Chinese society.