Students and Faculty Advance Urban Studies Research this Summer and Fall
by Xiangming Chen
Director, Urban Studies and Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Global Urban Studies and Sociology
Student Research/Scholarship at and After Trinity
Student research in Urban Studies has been steady since the major’s creation in 2013. In the mid- to late 2010s, a large Luce Foundation grant coupled with the Thomas Urban China Endowment supported a string of student research projects in China while other funded projects took place in Hartford and elsewhere. After the pandemic-induced hiatus, student summer research picked up again. In summer 2025, Hunter Trylch, a sophomore majoring in Economics and minoring in Urban China Studies, carried out field research in the Chinese city of Yiwu on its market-driven model as the world’s largest small-merchandise trade hub, located in the Yangtze River Delta region around Shanghai. Hunter teamed up with a recent URST graduate, Eric Zhang ’22, who had returned to Shanghai after completing a MA in Urban Studies at University of Pennsylvania. Eric mentored Hunter from his own research and internship experiences while at Trinity. Working with Professor Xiangming Chen in the field and afterward, Eric and Hunter published an article “Yiwu: How a barter town became the heartbeat of global small trade” in ThinkChina, an electronic magazine in Singapore, on September 5, 2025, with another jointly-authored, lengthier article forthcoming in The European Business Review in its November/December issue. Taylor Ogan ’18, another URST graduate who has been researching innovative high-tech companies in China as the founder and CEO of Shenzhen-based Snow Bull Capital, just published an article “Shenzhen: The city that built China’s tech empire” in ThinkChina on October 21, 2025, with Xiangming Chen.
A Small But Scholarly Active URST Faculty
While guiding student research, the URST faculty core, small as it is, has been highly active and productive in their own research and publication. The summer of 2025, just like the previous ones, allowed the URST faculty members to focus on their own research projects. And their hard work and efforts have paid off in recent scholarly outputs. Garth Myers’ book Postcolonial Urban Studies will be published by Agenda Press in December 2025. Laura Delgado recently had a second paper accepted and forthcoming in the highly ranked Journal of Urban Affairs where she had published a paper previously. Shoshana Goldstein has recently published a couple of book chapters while developing her book proposal. Mushahid Hussain, Arianna King, and Robert Cotto have been very busy and productive with their conference, research, and writing activities through the summer leading to forthcoming published scholarship. With scholars from China, the United Kingdom, Kenya, and Nigeria, Xiangming Chen is part of a new project with seed funding from Tongji University — “Digital Infrastructural Urbanism(s): Asia-Africa Encounters and Beyond,”— which recently received a second grant, from China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.
