Helen Siu

Helen F. Siu is a professor emeritus of anthropology and former chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. Her teaching interests are political and historical anthropology, and urban and global culture change. She has conducted decades of fieldwork in Southern China, exploring agrarian change and commerce, the nature of the socialist state, and the refashioning of identities. Lately, she explores the rural-urban interface in China, inter-Asian connections, China-Africa encounters, popular music, and new political space in Hong Kong.

Professor Siu has served on funding and research assessment committees in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She served on the University Grants Committee (1992–2001) and the Research Grants Council (1996–2001) in Hong Kong, for which she received the Bronze Bauhinia Star. In the US she has served on the Committee for Advanced Study in China and the National Screening Committee for Fulbright awards .

She is the founding director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, which highlights cross-disciplinary research and global collaborations. She is the author, co-author, and co-editor of many well-received publications. Her most recent book publications are Asia Inside Out (3 vols., Harvard University Press, 2015, 2019), Tracing China: A Forty-Year Ethnographic Journey (HKU Press, 2016), and the Chinese edition of Tracing China, entitled 《踏跡尋中: 四十年華南田野之旅》(CUHK Press, 2022). She is the producer of a documentary film on the Greater Bay Area (Metamorphosis of the Bay Area, 2025), and the executive producer of an earlier film on Hong Kong (Denise Ho: Becoming the Song; Kino Lorber 2020). Her academic profile can be viewed here.