Dr. Daniel Yoder Zipp earned his PhD from UCLA in sociology. Before coming to Maryland as a Collegiate Fellow, he was a visiting assistant professor of sociology in the areas of Globalization and Asia and Asian America at Oberlin College. 

His research interests include political and economic sociology, complex organizations and bureaucracy, and labor mobilizations in China, as well as Chinese American urban and neighborhood placemaking. His first research path focuses on the myriad of interests (capital, labor, and other state bureaucrats) that mid-level bureaucrats navigate and create as they (fail) to implement environmental policies in Shanxi and Henan provinces, located on China’s largest coalfield, that are meant to curb coal production, consumption, and pollution. His second research path focuses on the ways in which Chinese Americans make the city their own, through neighborhood creation, destruction, and rebranding in Los Angeles and Cleveland. In conducting his research, he uses in-depth qualitative methods, notably ethnography, historical ethnography, ethnographic interviews, and archival work.