Cheris Chan received her PhD in sociology from Northwestern University in 2004. Before joining HKU, she was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her writings have appeared in American Journal of Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, International Sociology, and The China Quarterly among others. She was a fellow of the Summer Institute on Economy and Society from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a recipient of a global fellowship from the International Institute of UCLA. Her article in Theory and Society won the Best Scholarly Article Award and the Best Scholarly Publication by an International Scholar Award from Section on Global and Transnational Sociology of American Sociological Association. Her article in American Journal of Sociology received Honorable Mention for Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Scholarship Award from Section on Economic Sociology of American Sociological Association, and won the Research Output Prize for the Faculty of Social Sciences from the University of Hong Kong.

Chan’s first book, Marketing Death: Culture and the Making of a Life Insurance Market in China (OUP, 2012), details how a life insurance market emerged in mainland China despite a cultural taboo on the discussion of premature death. Based on extensive ethnographic research, the book documents the dynamics and micro-politics through which transnational life insurance firms introduced this new commodity to the Chinese population, and how they competed with newly founded domestic insurance firms. Theoretically it analyzes how local cultures shape the trajectory and features of a new market. This project was subsequently expanded to include a comparative analysis of the market trajectories in Hong Kong and Taiwan, focusing on how state actions mediated the dominant players in the field and affected the extent of cultural adaptation of transnational corporations. Chan’s new project is a study of the rationalization and the legitimacy of Chinese medicine in mainland China and Hong Kong. It investigates the business strategies of traditional Chinese drug companies and the clinical practices of Chinese medicine doctors, asking how these strategies and practices are shaped by global, national, and regional institutional, political, and cultural conditions.