Vanessa Fong

Dr. Vanessa L. Fong is associate professor in the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University.  Her research examines the longitudinal consequences of China’s one-child policy for Chinese individuals, families, and society.  This work has been published in two ethnographies.  Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy (Stanford University Press, 2004) focuses on adolescents contending with the social, economic and psychological stresses driven by ambition and expectation in China’s highly competitive education system.  Her new book, Paradise Redefined: Transnational Chinese Students and the Quest for Flexible Citizenship in the Developed World (Stanford University Press, 2011), follows some of those adolescents into their university studies abroad.  Dr. Fong has also conducted research on local and global inequalities and development; citizenship, nationalism, transnationalism, migration, globalization, and the media; language ideologies; language learning among native speakers of Chinese; and  gender, pregnancy, reproductive technologies, among other topics.  Her edited books include Media, Identity, and Struggle in Twenty-First Century China with Rachel Murphy (London: Routledge, 2008), Chinese Citizenship: Views from the Margins with Rachel Murphy (London: Routledge, 2006) and Women in Republican China with Hua R. Lan ( M.E. Sharpe, 1999). At Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Dr. Fong teaches courses on Early Childhood Language Development across Cultures, Languages, and Countries; Chinese Education in Comparative Perspective; Citizenship, Identity, and Ethnographic Research Methods; Globalization, Transnational Migration, and International Education; and Psychological Anthropology.  She is currently supported by an NSF CAREER Award.  She is past recipient of fellowships and awards from such prestigious sources as the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, Cambridge University, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.