Associate Professor, Sociology & Anthropology, and Suzanne Wilson Barnett Chair in Contemporary China Studies
Yu Luo is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on ethnicity and indigeneity, rural transformations, heritage and tourism, vernacular media cultures, and more-than-human encounters in Asia. Her book, Ethnic Branding in Contemporary China: Buyi and the Paradox of Difference (University of Washington Press, 2025), examines the cultural politics of the Buyi ethnic group in her home province of Guizhou, southwestern China. The monograph was named the third-place winner of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s 2026 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing.
Luo’s research has appeared in Modern China, Ethnos, China Perspectives, Social Anthropology, Verge: Global Studies in Asias, Social & Cultural Geography, and the International Journal of Heritage Studies. She has also contributed to the Handbook on Ethnic Minorities in China and coauthored research on wildlife conservation. For a complete list of publications, please visit her Google Scholar and Academia.edu profiles.
Her work has been mentioned in the New York Times and featured on Phoenix TV’s Chinese Channel. Before joining the University of Puget Sound, Luo was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and an assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong.