She holds a J.S.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. She was a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows between 2013 and 2016. Her Ph.D dissertation won the 2014 American Sociological Association Dissertation Award, and her her book The Contentious Public Sphere in China (2018) has won the 2018 Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association and the 2018 Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award, Human Rights Section of the American Sociological Association.