photo taken by the author, 2023, Anxi County, China

Bio

Ziwei Zhang is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning, specializing in agrarian transformation amid urbanization and national development, with a focus on labor, society, and the environment. Engaging with political ecology, her ongoing dissertation investigates how China’s rural revolutions and reforms have shaped the interplay between the environment and rural society, through a detailed case study of a tea county. She has presented her academic work at conferences across various disciplines, including geography, environmental studies, peasant studies, and China studies. Her research is supported by multiple centers and institutions. In addition to her primary research in China, she is involved in projects in Indonesia and Mexico, addressing land tenure, resource management, and institutional building. She has published papers in Landscape Architecture Frontiers and several conference proceedings. In 2024-25, she is a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellow.

Ziwei holds a Master in Landscape Architecture, a Master in Design Studies in Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and a Bachelor of Architecture from Southeast University, China. She has also experience as an urban designer for one year for Stoss Landscape Urbanism, where she participated in projects in China, the U.S., and the United Arab Emirates.

Full CV available upon request

ziweizhang@g.harvard.edu

Research Interests

• Rural development
• Political ecology
• Environmental history