Assistant Professor
Political Science, Asian Studies
Christian Sorace is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado College. His work is grounded in the intersection of comparative politics and political theory. His book Shaken Authority: China's Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell University Press, 2017) explores the ideological and discursive foundations of the Chinese Communist Party’s authority and governance. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, Sorace’s book examines the Party’s response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which was intended to showcase its benevolence, glory, and state capacity. At the same time, he examines from a bottom-up perspective, how the reconstruction plans often failed to address the concrete and particular needs of the earthquake survivors.
He is also a co-editor of Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (Verso/ANU Press, 2019) and Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour (Verso forthcoming). His articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Critical Inquiry, Public Culture, and positions: asia critique, among other journals. He also is the editor of the Arts section of an open-access quarterly called Made in China, and host of the podcast Utopian Futures.
Sorace’s current research focuses on the interlocking crises of democracy, capitalism, air pollution, and urbanization in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. He is the recipient of a Fulbright award to conduct research in Mongolia in Spring 2022. He speaks Chinese fluently and Mongolian at an advanced level.
Among the courses he teaches are Politics of China, Reading Marx in the Time of COVID-19, Utopia and Dystopia, Power and Everyday Life, and Introduction to Comparative Politics.
Previously, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University's Australian Centre on China in the World (ANU-CIW), obtained a PhD in Government from the University of Texas, Austin, MA from the University of Chicago, and BA from Trinity College (Hartford, CT).
Contact Info
Areas: Politics of China, Comparative Politics, Political Theory