Weirong Guo is the inaugural Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Emory University in 2023, and a B.A. and M.A. in sociology from Fudan University in Shanghai, China in 2014 and 2017. As a cultural and political sociologist, she adopts a comparative and transnational approach, coupled with mixed methods, to study the Asian diaspora and global China.
Her work has been published in Cultural Sociology and Social Psychology Quarterly, among other journals, and received several best paper awards. She is also a co-editor of Cultural Sociology: Classics & Frontiers, the first Chinese-language anthology that introduces to the Chinese audience the latest developments in cultural sociology in North America.
Her dissertation and book project, titled “Home Is Where I Stand”: A Comparative Study of Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism Among Chinese Students in the United States and China, examines how Chinese students negotiate their racial, national, and global identities amid the rise of anti-Asian racism and the difficult China-U.S. geopolitics. Drawing on comparative ethnographic work at three universities in the U.S. and China, over 100 in-depth interviews, and text analysis of news articles, she addresses why and how some Chinese students can develop supranational or cosmopolitan identification, whereas others remain apolitical or become more nationalistic.
Beyond her research, Dr. Guo is also an award-winning teacher. She was the recipient of the Graduate Student Teaching Award and the Dean’s Teaching Fellowship from Emory University.