John Zinda studies social and environmental change, primarily in rural China. His research and teaching examine how state policies and community practices intersect to shape livelihoods and landscapes in contexts of agricultural development programs, afforestation efforts, biodiversity conservation, tourism operations, and labor migration.

Liren Zheng is the curator of the Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia at the Cornell University Library. Previously he was the curator of the Dr. Shao You-Bao Overseas Chinese Research and Documentation Center, Ohio University Library.

XU Xin is the program manager for the China and Asia-Pacific Studies program (CAPS). His research and teaching focus on Chinese foreign policy and East Asian international relations. His areas of interest include the identity politics of the Taiwan issue, China’s grand strategy, East Asian security politics, and Olympics and international relations.

John Whitman is a professor of linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences. His main interest is the problem of language variation: its limits (how much specific subsystems can vary across languages) and predictors (what typological features co-occur systematically). Exploration of this general problem has led him to work on historical linguistics and language acquisition, in addition to his central interest in synchronic syntactic variation across typologically similar languages. 

Ding Xiang Warner's research interests include Chinese literature and literary thought from Han dynasty through the early Song, early and medieval Chinese intellectual history, and the study of textual production and text culture in premodern China.

Qi Wang is professor of human development, psychology, and cognitive science at Cornell University. She is the past associate director of the Cornell East Asia Program and former department chair of human development.

Suyoung Son is a literary and cultural historian of early modern China (1500-1900). Her research focuses on the narrative tradition and social practice of writing and reading in the historical conditions of print culture, commercialization, and urbanization.

Kristin Roebuck is drafting a book manuscript entitled Japan Reborn: Race and the Family of Nations after World War II. The book explores a mass-mediated furor with geopolitical implications that erupted in the 1950s over "mixed-blood" children born to Japanese women and American soldiers stationed in defeated Japan. Japan Reborn exposes how Japanese nationalism, often erroneously held to have vanished in the wake of defeat in World War II, was instead reconstructed on a new basis: that of the "pure race" rather than the failed state. 

An-Yi Pan researches Buddhist Art with special interest in the relation between Chinese intellectual participation in Buddhism and Buddhist painting, Buddhist architecture in relation to precepts, monastic hieratical structure, liturgical as well as spiritual spaces, and trans-continental blossoming of Buddhist teachings and art. He also devotes research to modern Chinese art and contemporary Taiwanese art, investigating the impact of colonialism and current geopolitical influence on Chinese and Taiwanese art from the late 19th century to now.

Victor Nee's current research interests in economic sociology examines the role of networks and norms in the emergence of economic institutions and organizations. He is working on an ongoing study of endogenous institutional change focusing on networks and norms of entrepreneurs and firms in the Yangzi delta region of China. The study asks: Why and how did a modern capitalist economic order emerge in China? Where do economic institutions come from?