Degree Pursued: PhD

Anticipated Degree Year: 2026

Committee Chair/Advisor: Juno Salazar Parreñas

Discipline: Anthropology

Primary Language: Vietnamese

Research Countries: Vietnam

Research Interests: Xinlei SHA, a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at Cornell University. Her research interests include economic anthropology, feminist,gender and sexuality studies, digital ethnography, critical race studies, and visual anthropology. Her current research project centers on Chinese and Vietnamese female sex workers’ working and living experiences in the transnational sex industry across China, Vietnam, and Kenya. Her dissertation research is sponsored by external grants and internal grants from Cornell University, for instance, The Wenner Gren Foundation Fieldwork Grant and Social Science Research Council-International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF). Alongside her dissertation research, she is committed to engaged and multimodal approaches to work with marginal populations seeking social justice and communal ethics of collaborative research. She develops her interests and skills with ethnographic film making and works on ethnographic documentaries. She obtained her BA in English Language and Literature in Sichuan International Studies University, MA in China Studies in City University of Hong Kong, MPhil in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies at Cambridge University, and MA in Anthropology at Cornell University.