Zhou Yongming is a chair professor and Vice President (Academic) at BNBU. He attended Nanjing University from 1980-1987 and taught briefly in the Chinese Department before studying abroad. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University in 1997. He became an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, obtained the tenure in 2005 and the full professorship in 2010. In 2001-2002, he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. Before joining BNBU, he was a chair professor and directed the Center for Social Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). He also served as the Executive Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at SUSTech. He was appointed as a “Qiushi” Chair Professor by Zhejiang University and a distinguished professor by Sun Yat-Sen University and Chongqing University.
Professor Zhou specializes in historical and cultural anthropology. He is the author of books Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth-Century China: Nationalism, History, and State-Building (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) and Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (Stanford University Press, 2006). He has also been a Mellon Fellow at the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge, a visiting fellow at the East Asian Institute (1999) and a senior fellow at the Asia Institute (2008) at the National University of Singapore. Professor Zhou served as the president of the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs in 2012. His latest “roadology” project focuses on the socio-cultural impacts of transnational road building on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau and in the Great Mekong Subregion. He is the editor of “Roadology”: Roads, Space and Culture and Chinese Anthropology, and is editor-in-chief of the Heritage Studies.
