Jen Wu

Jennifer D. Wu

PhD, Political Science

Welcome to my website. I am a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2023-2024 academic year. Starting Fall 2024, I will be an Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at SUNY Binghamton.

My research focuses on race, identity, and behavior in American politics. My dissertation project, "The Politics of Asian-ness: Understanding the Importance of National Origin and Group Membership on the Political Representation" focuses on Asian American political behavior and examines the conditions and context in which the pan-Asian identity is politically unifying, despite great variation in national origin backgrounds. Through a series of studies, which employ methodologies ranging from experimental design to observational analysis, I find that national origin identity is often more important than the pan-ethnic identity, but pan-Asian identity can nonetheless be activated and made salient in political contexts.

I received my PhD in Political Science from Yale University in 2023, where I was affiliated with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Center for the Study of American Politics. I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 with a BA in Economics, Mathematics, and Theatre Arts, and from University College London (UCL) in 2014 with an MSc Economics.

NOTE: This is an old, outdated version of my website. Find my new website here.