Lisa M. Hoffman

Lisa M. Hoffman is Professor in the School of Urban Studies at University of Washington Tacoma and faculty in China Studes at UW.  Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she describes her interdisciplinary work as anthropology of the urban. Her scholarship has focused on questions of power, governing and social change, with a particular interest in subjectivity and its intersections with spatiality.  Research projects include studies of professionals/ism and volunteers/ism in urban China, anthropology of neoliberalism, and regimes of green urbanisms and rural urbanization in China.  Her work has been published in journals such as Economy and Society; Territory, Politics, Governance; IJURR, Pacific Affairs, and Hau. Book publications include Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China (2010, Temple UP), Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday (2015, UGeorgia Press, co-edited with Heather Merrill), and Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma (2020, UW Press, co-authored with Mary Hanneman).