Postdoctoral Affiliate
Dr Yuan Zhang is a Research Fellow at LSE and Postdoctoral Affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.
She completed her DPhil in Anthropology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, with her thesis approved without corrections. She also holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Oxford, alongside a Master’s degree in Global Affairs and a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Tsinghua University.
Yuan’s doctorate explored care, futurity, and spiritual practices through the lens of built environments in rural China. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork in North China, her research examined how people navigate religious encounters, socio-economic transformations, and uncertain futures through houses, tombs, and fengshui practices. Her work has been published in Ethnos (2025) and Anthropology Today (2023).
Currently, Yuan is developing a book manuscript and expanding research into two areas: housing, infrastructure, and social policy in China; the intersection of spirituality and technology.
