My research is at the crossroads of Economic History, Political Economy, and Text Analysis.
My doctoral dissertation, "Collective Action in State and Society: 19th and 20th Century China," has been awarded the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Grant # 2214884. This project offers a new micro-level interpretation of China’s political transition in the 20th century—tracing its path from empire to nation-state, from Kuomintang rule to Communist governance—by drawing on large-scale historical data and exploiting local variation in state-building efforts, social mobilization, and land reform.
More broadly, my work seeks to bridge the gap between qualitative historical narratives and quantitative social science. I am especially interested in developing new methods to extract structured information from unstructured sources such as local gazetteers, genealogies, and historical newspapers. To this end, I explore the use of AI and natural language processing (NLP) techniques for analyzing archival material at scale.