His work spans the fields of American and comparative politics, including both democratic and authoritarian regimes. He is particularly interested in examining how political institutions shape law and policy, whether that is through the legislators who make them or the judges who interpret them.

Prof Feng Tian focuses his research on machine learning, with particular interest in developing advanced approaches on representation learning and data clustering.

Thematically, his academic interests mostly center on the emergence of the Islamic movement and faith tradition in the historical context of the late antique Middle East. His recent research explores the questions of ideology, imperialism and propaganda in Byzantine, Sasanian, and early Islamic societies. In 2013, he was awarded a Mellon doctoral fellowship to join the research project The Qur?an Seminar, directed by Gabriel Said Reynolds at Notre Dame University. Tesei has a Ph.D.

His primary interest is in utilizing action research and other qualitative research methods to promote good teaching practices and further explore professional development. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include English for academic purposes and the teaching of writing. In general, he is strongly interested in promoting the learning of all foreign languages. He has served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan province and as a U.S Department of State English language fellow and specialist in Chengdu and Beijing.

His research interests focus on second language writing, translingual studies, and multimodal composition. His recent work has looked at how second language theories respond to increasingly diversified teaching and learning contexts and facilitate second language practice and pedagogy. He is particularly interested in studying second language writing practice and pedagogy from translingual perspectives.

His current research focus includes AI-assisted intelligent transportation systems, internet of vehicles, wireless sensor network, and mobile vehicular cloud/edge computing.

His research focus is on intersections of nonlinear dynamics, acoustics of Asian musical instruments, and mathematical physics. He is currently interested in the tuning of the guqin and guzheng, and with high-frequency overtones of both spoken Chinese and Asian operatic singing. For fun, he writes high school-level physics competition problems and experiments.

Sprague has an M.A. in teaching English as a second language from Pennsylvania State University, where he focused on second language writing and theories of second language acquisition. He served as an English language fellow sponsored by the U.S. State Department from 2015 to 2018. In that capacity, he traveled through China providing training in teaching methodologies. He has previously lived in Beijing, Chengdu, Shenyang and Kaifeng.

Her research lies at the intersection of comparative politics, behavioral economics and experimental psychology with a focus on civic engagement and democratic participation at the local level. Conceptually, she is interested in the psychological mechanisms of political learning. Empirically, she combines field experiments, lab experiments, and ethnographic fieldwork to identify how political efficacy interacts with extreme political skepticism during democratic consolidation.