Shanshan Lan is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research at the intersection of race and migration studies. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is interested in the transnational circulation of racial knowledge embedded in diverse types of migration flows between the Global North and Global South.

Lan is the recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant for her project “The reconfiguration of whiteness in China: Privileges, precariousness, and racialized performances” (2019–2025), which is funded by the European Research Council. Her early research focused on the multi-linear process of racial knowledge formation among working-class Chinese migrants in Chicago. Her second book, Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging (Routledge, 2017), highlights grassroots perspectives on China/Africa trade relations through an examination of daily interactions between Africans and rural-to-urban Chinese migrants in various informal trading spaces in Guangzhou.

At SCAS, Lan will work on her new book, which explores the lived experiences of privileged Western migrants in China and the contested meanings of whiteness in the new context of the Covid-19 pandemic, shifting power relations between China and major Western countries, and the rise of popular nationalism in Chinese society.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.