We are delighted to announce that Prof. Deborah Davis has accepted our invitation to be a keynote speaker at the International Conference on spatial and Social Transformation in Urban China, 13-14 December, 2012.

Deborah Davis is currently Professor of Sociology at Yale University where she has also served as Director of Academic Programs at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Chair of the Department of Sociology, Chair of the Council of East Asian Studies, and co-chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum. Author or editor of eight books, past publications have analyzed the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese family life, pension and welfare policy, consumer culture, property rights, social stratification and occupational mobility.  In 2009 Stanford University Press published Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-Socialist China, co-edited with Wang Feng and this year she and anthropologist Sara Friedman have completed a new volume entitled Marriage and Sexuality in Cosmopolitan China. In a current project with Professors Chen Juan ( HKPU) and Pierre Landry ( University of Pittsburgh) she is examining  how  the “penalties of rural birth” vary across time and space.