Professor Hurst completed his undergraduate degree in both Political Science and East Asian Languages & Civilisations (N. American equivalent of EAS/AMES), as well as a Masters focused mainly on Sociology, at the University of Chicago, before going on to do his PhD in Political Science at the University of California-Berkeley. After that, he was a visiting instructor at Bowdoin College, a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford, assistant professor at the University of Texas and University of Toronto, and associate professor and professor at Northwestern University, before coming to Cambridge. Trained originally as a China specialist, he has been working for more than 20 years on Indonesia as well. All of his work is fieldwork-based and he’s therefore spent significant periods conducting research in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Indonesia. Though a political scientist, with strong roots in the study of domestic politics in China and Indonesia, his research, teaching, and interests cross over at the intersection of multiple disciplines, including sociology, history, law, development studies, international relations, and (of course) area studies.
I teach a range of papers and classes on contemporary Chinese politics, society, and international relations, from first-year undergraduate through PhD levels.
Unconstrained by most disciplinary boundaries and with broad interests, I have supervised and worked with PhD students in politics, sociology, development studies, law, history, and area studies. I am eager to work with exceptional graduate students seeking to take on big challenges and substantively important topics, ready to spend significant energy and time extracting and gathering original data at close range, and aspiring to develop and deploy new concepts, theories, and ideas to shake and remake the field.
Broadly, I am interested in Chinese and Indonesian political economy, institutions, law, urban & rural local politics, subnational and cross-national comparison, contemporary history, social movements and contentious politics, labour politics, international relations, and the interplay between subnational, national, and international factors and forces in processes of policy and political change.
