Fall 2018 seminar: Ph.D candidate, anthropology
Xinyu Guan is a second-year Ph.D. student in anthropology. He is interested in discourses of middle-class homeownership, state-society relations, and anxieties about high-rise "killer litter" in postcolonial Asian cities, with a specific focus on Singapore and Hong Kong. As a Mellon Fellow, Guan wishes to explore opportunities for multimodal, collaborative ways of reformulating concepts of power, discipline, and politics in postsocialist and/or neoliberalizing Asian cities.
Prior to joining Cornell, Guan completed a master's degree in urban studies at University College London, where he wrote his thesis on the history of a radical housing project in 1970s Hamburg, seeking to challenge patriarchal nuclear-family norms by integrating families and single people in multi-family apartments. Guan also holds a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Columbia University.