معرفی
Iza Ding serves as Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, currently on research leave for the 2024-2025 academic year. Her scholarly profile bridges American academia with extensive field research conducted in China, Germany, and Mongolia, reflecting her deep engagement with cross-cultural political phenomena.
Her educational background includes a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University (2016) and a B.A. in Political Science and Russian and Eastern European Studies from the University of Michigan (2009), establishing a strong foundation for her comparative approach to political analysis.
Ding's research program investigates the paradoxes of modernization, particularly examining how societies navigate tensions between institutional rigidity and creative resistance, traditional moral frameworks and legal development, historical memory and socioeconomic transformation, and humanity's complex relationship with nature. Her work demonstrates methodological versatility through the integration of comparative historical analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and experimental approaches.
Her publications reveal a consistent trajectory examining governance under authoritarian conditions, with particular attention to China's environmental politics, bureaucratic dynamics, and ideological frameworks. The body of work shows increasing sophistication in connecting micro-level political behaviors with macro-level institutional structures.
- Berlin Prize Fellow at American Academy in Berlin (2024)
- Visiting Fellow at Hertie School of Governance in Berlin (2025)
Ding actively contributes to both academic and public discourse, writing for non-academic outlets including The Ideas Letter and Berlin Journal. Her current research focuses on global historical waves of environmentalism, building on her acclaimed monograph The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell University Press, 2022). She maintains an active public presence through Substack (izading.substack.com) and social media platforms where she engages with contemporary political debates.
