Professor Hurst is Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development at the University of Cambridge. He 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. His books include Urban Chinese Governance, Contention, and Social Control in the New Millennium (Brill, 2019) and Ruling Before the Law: The Politics of Legal Regimes in China and Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
