Pei-Chia Lan

Pei-Chia Lan is the Wang and Chen Senior Fellow in Taiwan Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of the Taiwan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, effective September 1, 2026. As a qualitative sociologist, she studies the complexity of intersecting social inequalities in everyday life, shaped by macropower dynamics such as globalization and international migration. 

Before joining Stanford, Lan was a distinguished professor in the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University, where she was the founding director of the Global Asia Research Center and recipient of five teaching awards. 

Her scholarly articles have been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Migration Review, The Sociological Review, and Comparative Migration Studies, among others. She is also the author of several books in Chinese and English, the latter including Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford University Press, 2018), which examines how ethnic Chinese parents in Taiwan and the United States negotiate cultural differences and class inequality to raise children in the contexts of globalization and immigration; and Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke University Press, 2006), which won a Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars.

Lan received her doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University, and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology from National Taiwan University. She was a 2024-2025 Stanford-Taiwan Social Science Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; a 2011-2012 Yenching-Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University; a 2026-2007 Fulbright scholar at New York University; and a 2000-2001 postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley. She also held visiting positions at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Kyoto University, Tubingen University, and IIAS at Leiden University.

She has actively engaged in international professional networks, serving as deputy editor of the journal Gender & Society and an editor or board member for other esteemed journals. Her research cultivates critical dialogue between academia and the public, and her expertise is sought by local government agencies and global organizations alike, as demonstrated by her role on the advisory board of UN Women.