Rate My Professor Pun Ngai

Pun Ngai is Chair Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, a position she has held since 2021. She previously served as Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. Pun Ngai earned her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 1998, MPhil from the University of Hong Kong, and BSocSc from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She currently also serves as Programme Director of the Master of Cultural Studies Programme and Director of the Centre for Cultural Research and Development at Lingnan University. Additionally, she holds the position of Honorary Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong's Global China Research Hub.

Her research specializations encompass labour, migration, class, gender, commons, China, and Inter-Asia, with publications spanning cultural studies, China studies, labour studies, anthropology, and sociology. Pun Ngai has published extensively in leading journals including Positions, Public Culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Work, Employment and Society, The China Quarterly, Modern China, The China Journal, and Cultural Anthropology. Key books include Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Duke University Press, 2005), Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers (co-authored with Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, 2016), and Migrant Labor in Post-Socialist China (Polity Press, 2016). These works, along with her Chinese books 《中國女工》 (2007) and 《大工地上：中國農民工之歌》 (2011), have been widely adopted as required reading in universities across America, Europe, Asia, and translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Chinese. Major awards include the 2006 C. Wright Mills Award for Made in China—the first for an Asian scholar in the award's history—Hong Kong Ten Best Books Awards in 2007 and 2011, and recognition in Stanford University's World's Top 2% Scientists list, ranking second in Hong Kong for Cultural Studies. Recent publications address China's infrastructural capitalism, creative labour, and commoning practices.