Hello! My name is Junius Brown (rhymes with “Julius”), and I am currently finishing my PhD at the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

I recently accepted a job offer as Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Duke Kunshan University. I will start remotely in Fall 2024, teaching from the San Francisco Bay Area, and in-person in Spring 2025.

My three-part dissertation explores the way in which Chinese citizens and government officials interact on online help forums like the Message Board for Leaders. In particular, I focus on how letter-writers put on performative displays of citizenship in order to appeal to local officials, and how local officials respond to their requests. My published work appears in Asian Survey and The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Citizenship.

I highly value teaching as a core part of my academic contribution, and in 2021 I received an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award from UC Berkeley’s Teaching and Resource Center. My experience as a graduate student instructor covers authoritarian politics, East Asian politics, political economy, comparative politics, and international relations. You can find a detailed list of the courses I have taught here, and a summary of my course evaluations here.