Deborah S. Davis

Deborah S. Davis’s primary teaching interests are inequality and stratification, contemporary Chinese society, and methods of fieldwork. In addition to teaching at Yale, she runs a summer fieldwork seminar where Yale students work collaboratively with students from Hong Kong and China. Davis is currently a Trustee of the Yale China Association and serves as Associate Editor of The Journal of Asian Studies, and on the editorial board of The China Quarterly and The China Review. In 2004 she helped launch the Yale China Health Journal. At Yale she has 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, director of graduate studies in both East Asian Studies and Sociology, member of the Publications Committee for Yale Press,  and co-chair of the Women Faculty Forum .

Author or editor of ten books, past publications have analyzed the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese family life, social welfare policy, consumer culture, property rights, social stratification, occupational mobility, and impact of rapid urbanization and migration on health and happiness. In 2009, Stanford University Press published Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-Socialist China, co-edited with Wang Feng, and in 2014, Wives, Husbands and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China, co-edited with Sara Friedman. Currently she is completing a book entitled His, Her and Their Marriages that analyzes the social consequences of the one child policy and privatization on the institution of marriage and urban kinship.

A graduate of Wellesley College, Davis received a masters degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard, a Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University, and post-doctoral research grants from ACLS, SSRC, the National Academy of Sciences, NIA, and the Luce, Rockefeller, and Templeton Foundations. In 2013 she was awarded the Yale College Lex Hixon ’63 Teaching Prize for Excellence in the Social Sciences.