Julie Y. Chu is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on transnational migration, economy and value, gender and kinship, religion and ritual, and practices of media and representation. She is currently completing a book project entitled Cosmologies of Credit: Fuzhounese Migration and the Politics of Destination (Duke University Press, forthcoming), which is based on fieldwork in a transnational Chinese village with a history of emigration via human smuggling networks. Her broader research interests include material culture, visual anthropology and ethnographic film production, science and technology studies, and bureaucracy and state governmentality. Her next project will examine the pragmatics and poetics of state identification technologies and the production of national security in the post 9-11 era.
Professor Chu received her Ph.D. from New York University along with a certificate of specialization in ethnographic film theory and documentary video production from NYU’s Program in Culture and Media. Her doctoral research was supported by the Social Science Research Council’s International Migration Program, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and the American Anthropological Association’s Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program. Before arriving at Wellesley, she spent a year at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Besides her academic research, Professor Chu has directed a short ethnographic documentary about Japanese popular music or “J-Pop” in New York City and currently has two other documentary projects in progress.
Her publications include “When Alan Turing Was a Computer: Notes on the Rise and Decline of Punch Card Technologies” (connect: art.politics.theory.practice, 2001), “To Be ‘Emplaced’: Fuzhounese Migration and the Politics of Destination” (Identities, forthcoming) and “Equation Fixations: On the Sum and the Whole of Dollars in Foreign Exchange” in Truitt (ed.) Encounters With Money (Berg, forthcoming).