Yen-Yu Lin
(she/her/她)
Yen-Yu Lin
(she/her/她)
I am a global and transnational sociologist using qualitative methods to study race, colonial empires, and material culture.
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I received my sociology Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2023. In August 2023, I started as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at DePauw University (tenure-track). I currently serve as a board member of the North American Taiwan Studies Association (2024-2027) and was the Program Director for the 2022 NATSA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Additionally, I co-founded the Ngasan Maku Study Society in Tokyo during the 2014 Sunflower Movement as a college student, fostering interdisciplinary dialogues on Taiwan globally.
I specialize in global and transnational sociology, comparative-historical sociology, and the sociology of race and empires. My specific research keywords include material culture, empires, race, and intersectionality. I am particularly interested in the relationship between material culture and systems of domination and how this relationship has historically affected marginalized people. My current book project, The Raceless Racism: Visibility and Invisibility of Race in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, studies how racial categories were constructed and deconstructed through visual representations in colonial Taiwan.
My other works-in-progress include: (1) “Contouring system” (a theory of racial hierarchies) in colonial Taiwan; (2) Self-racialization in Japan and Korea (co-authored with Dr. Veda H. Kim); and (3) "Embodied supremacy" theory, which studies how East Asian women's bodies manifest the power structure of global white supremacy. My research has been published in English, Mandarin, and Japanese, engaging interdisciplinary audiences across sociology, history, and political science.
Prior to my Ph.D. studies, I was trained in political science at National Taiwan University (International Relations as my undergraduate major, Comparative Politics as my graduate school major) and at Waseda University in Japan (Global Political Economy as my second undergraduate major). As a graduate student, I served as a teaching assistant for Criminology, Intro to Sociology, and Intro to Political Science. I am committed to teaching difficult topics such as class, race, and gender from comparative perspectives.
At DePauw, I teach Introduction to Sociology, Social Theory, Methods of Social Research, Global and Transnational Sociology, and Sociology of Art. I am looking forward to teaching a new course, Sociology of Spirituality, at DePauw in 2026, and I welcome any insights and suggestions for developing this new course.
My ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-8443-9298.
COMMUNITY OUTREACH
I am a current board member of the North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) (2024-2027). I was the Program Director of the NATSA 2022 Annual Meeting in Washington D.C., "Taiwan Studies in Application."
I am a co-founder of a student NGO "Ngasan Maku Study Society in Tokyo," which was founded during the Sunflower Movement in 2014. "Ngasan Maku" means "my home" in Atayal (one of the Taiwanese aboriginal languages).