Julie Y. Chu

About

Contact Information

Office: Haskell 331
Phone: (773) 702-7708
Email: juliechu@uchicago.edu

(PhD, NYU, 2004; Assistant Professor) Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Her book, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society and the 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her current writing project is entitled, Infrastructures of Mobility: An ethnography of dis/connections in Southern China. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers, this work will analyze border technologies and the various infrastructures in place (legal-rational, financial, cosmic, piratical) for managing the flows of people and things between Southern China and the United States. A graduate of NYU’s Program in Culture and Media, she is also currently completing video projects related to her fieldwork as well as developing a new ethnographic focus on Chinese soundscapes, especially in relation to the changing qualities and valuations of the Chinese concept of “renao” (热闹, a bustling scene, social liveliness or literally, “heat and noise”). (On Leave 2012-2013)

Selected Works

Selected Publications

Year Title / Publications PDF
n.d. Leaving Longyan, ethnographic film in production.
n.d. When Infrastructures Attack: Disrepair in Action (preparation for journal submission).
n.d. Unsettling Accounts: Debt, Theft and the Calculus of Fortune Among Chinese Transmigrants (preparation for journal submission).
2010 Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Duke University Press.
2010 The Attraction of Numbers: Accounting for Ritual Expenditures in Fuzhou, China. Anthropological Theory, 10 (1-2): 132-142. PDF
2009 Departing China: Identification Papers and the Pursuit of Burial Rights in Fuzhou. In Sabine Berking and Magdalena Zolkos, eds., Between Life and Death; Governing Populations in the Era of Human Rights. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. PDF
2007 Equation Fixations: On the Whole and the Sum of Dollars in Foreign Exchange. In A. Truitt & S. Senders, eds., Money: Ethnographic Encounters. Oxford: Berg Publishers. PDF
2006 To Be ‘Emplaced’: Fuzhounese Migration and the Politics of Destination. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. 13(3): 395-425. PDF
2001 When Alan Turning Was a Computer: Notes on the Rise and Decline of Punch Card Technologies. Connect: art.politics.theory.practice. Vol. 1, no. 2. PDF
2000 Meet Halo Halo, 28-minute video documentary produced and directed.