Fellowship / Fellows

William Hurst

  • 2015–2016
  • Social Sciences
  • Northwestern University
Headshot of William Hurst
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

William Hurst, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, focuses mainly on Chinese and Indonesian politics, especially the politics of courts and legal institutions, labor politics, contentious politics, and political economy.

During his fellowship year, Hurst plans to concentrate on revising his new book manuscript for publication. Tentatively titled “Ruling before the Law: the Politics of Legal Regimes in China and Indonesia,” the book explores previously under-researched aspects of the legal systems of the world’s largest and fourth-largest countries from the 1940s to the present day and also offers new theoretical insights for analyzing the politics of courts and legal institutions across a variety of other contexts. The work makes extensive use of archival, documentary, observational, and interview sources and data from both countries that were either unavailable or simply never utilized before.

Hurst completed his PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005, after receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Chicago in 1998. In addition to more than two dozen journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and coeditor of Laid-Off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Local Governance Innovation in China: Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance (Routledge, 2015).  

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

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