Her research focus is the intersection among religion, gender, urbanization, public good, ethnicity, and charisma. She is especially interested in how people cross religious, ethnic, rural-urban and other boundaries. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include ethnography of China, ethnicity and diversity, and urbanization and changing religious landscapes.
She is the editor (with Robert Weller) of "It Happens Among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth" (Berghahn 2019) and the co-author (with Robert Weller, C. Julia Huang-Lemmon and Lizhu Fan 2019) of "Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies" (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She has had papers published in leading academic journals including Current Anthropology, Modern China and Journal of Asian Studies. She has been a member of the American Anthropological Association and Association of Asian Studies since 2006.
Wu has a B.A. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Boston University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she taught at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Sun Yat-sen University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.