Chenyu Wang

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Hamilton College

Chenyu Wang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a core faculty member in Education Studies at Hamilton College. Her research examines how education shapes moral and political subjectivities across China and the United States. Her current book project follows Chinese students through elite American liberal arts colleges and educational volunteer programs in rural China, asking how liberal arts education become tied to ethical responsibility, personal transformation, and relations with others.

More broadly, her work unpacks the moral and political lives of educational institutions. She is particularly interested in how students, teachers, and educational volunteers come to understand their responsibilities to others and how they negotiate competing visions of social change. Her research on Black immigrant students and families examines how differing understandings of Blackness shape experiences of belonging and exclusion in U.S. schools.

Her scholarship also attends to the often-unrecognized relational labor through which educators sustain students, schools, and communities. This interest informs her engagement with oral history and with the Teachers in the Movement Institute’s work documenting teachers as intellectuals, community actors, and participants in broader struggles over education and social transformation.

Before joining Hamilton, Wang was a research associate with the University of Virginia’s Center for Race and Public Education in the South and contributed to the Teachers in the Movement Project. Her scholarship has appeared in Ethnography, Anthropological Quarterly, Learning and Teaching, Citizenship Teaching & Learning, and the Journal for the Anthropology of North America.