Trained in urban sociology, Xiangming Chen is a comparative scholar of cities and their dwellers in all their local attributes and conditions and their global dimensions and connections. He has pursued this core research interest by addressing such critical questions as how cities and communities change or continue through the intersection between local factors and global forces, shaped or mediated by national politics and regional dynamics. He has studied Chinese urbanism within and across a variety of locales including China’s coastal megacities of Shenzhen and Shanghai with their regional environs, its interior megacities of Xi’an and Wuhan with their growing global ties, and its small cities on the China-Kazakhstan, China-Laos, China-Myanmar, and China-North Korea borders as different cases and forms of peripheral or frontier urbanism, with comparative references to and analyses of a number of cities in Africa, Europe, India, and Southeast Asia, as well as Trinity’s home city of Hartford.

Xiangming Chen has published extensively. He co-authored The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Blackwell Publishers, 2003; Chinese edition, 2005), authored As Borders Bend: Transnational Spaces on the Pacific Rim (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), and co-authored Introduction to Cities: How Place and Space Shape Human Experience (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; second edition, 2018). He edited and contributed heavily to Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity (University of Minnesota Press, 2009; Chinese edition, 2009) and co-edited and contributed to Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai (Routledge, 2015; Chinese edition, 2016; Korean edition, 2017). His work has also appeared in many peer-reviewed journals and edited books.

Channeling and leveraging his scholarly research, Xiangming Chen has published short essays and commentaries on a variety of topics, including their republished versions, in printed or online special magazines and policy outlets such as Internationale Politik, The European Financial Review, The World Financial Review, The Eurasian Review, The China Business Review, All China Review, ThinkChina, Asia Pathways, East Asia Forum, DOMES: International Review of Architecture, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, IIE Networker, Chicago Office, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Center on Global Cities website, among others.

Xiangming Chen believes in the value of teaching from and in strong connection to his research. Moreover, he encourages students to see that they can widen and deepen learning in the classroom from pursuing their own research that may connect to and benefit from his expertise, supervision, and collaboration. This philosophy and approach have led to 20 joint publications with more than a dozen Trinity students including an edited book on Hartford and other New England cities (see the Publication tab).  

Extended bio