Hello! My name is Junius Brown (rhymes with “Julius”), and I am the newly-hired Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Economy (4-year) at Duke Kunshan University. Before that, I was a PhD student in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in May 2024.

My three-part dissertation explored the way in which Chinese citizens and government officials interact on online help forums like the Message Board for Leaders. In particular, I focused 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. In 2021 I received an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award from UC Berkeley’s Teaching and Resource Center, and I am currently participating in the Learning Innovation Fellowship hosted by DKU’s Center for Teaching and Learning. My primary teaching areas are East Asian politics, authoritarian politics, comparative politics, international relations, and the political economy of development. You can find a detailed list of the courses I have taught here, and a summary of my course evaluations here.

As of Summer 2024, I am still working remotely from the San Francisco Bay Area, and will not begin in-person at DKU until January 2025. I am happy to meet around Berkeley or Stanford, and you can also find me at APSA’s Comparative Politics Teaching & Learning Symposium (June 27-29) and the Mobilization-SDSU Conference (July 8-9).