Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

Professor Jung’s research seeks to better understand how elective pricing operates in influencing consumer behavior. In a series of field and lab experiments, she has been investigating the psychological variables that explain the generosity of consumers under pay-what-you-want pricing. But there are still a number of unanswered questions about what contributes to such generosity and what sustains such behavior. Professor Jung is interested in working with Chinese companies to test how a different cultural system can engender or discourage generosity in elective pricing systems. Professor Jung is also interested in conducting field experiments to replicate the behaviors we have seen in the USA and in China to test the robustness of social preferences across different cultures.

Many historians of modernism have argued that the technique of attention is a central category that dominates discussions on perception in science and art in Germany and Austria around 1900. While there have been major publications on the subject in art history, cultural studies and history of sciences, there has been little research on the transfer between sciences and literature. Bubacz’s dissertation, 'The Possibility of the Senses', analyzes the often-overlooked marginal writings of Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Musil in the context of the history of science in Austria. Investigating the diaries, notebooks, letters, and short prose of these two major Austrian authors, Bubacz plans to reconstruct their distinctive literary contribution to the discourse on perception and argue that their unparalleled examination of attention helped to challenge reductionist approaches especially in biology and psychology. Bubacz’s project thus tries to remedy the gap in the research on the history of attention by reconstructing the intertextual relations between science and the literary production in Austria. He plans to finish the last chapter of his dissertation during his time in Shanghai. Bubacz’s research is not directly connected to the site but relates to his work as a German language teacher. It is his goal as a language instructor to engage every student, often by contrasting German culture to their individual experience. While a GRI fellow in Shanghai, Bubacz hopes to broaden his understanding of different cultural backgrounds to better integrate the growing diversity in the classroom.

Liu and her faculty advisor, Dr. Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, are working on a research project that seeks to address both research/literature gaps in knowledge and the needs of the Chinese immigrant families in New York. They plan to add a China component to the study and also plan to do some ethnographic fieldwork on family members and relatives in China that are connected to the Chinese families that they have been observing since the beginning of the study in New York/US. Through their ethnographic fieldwork in New York City, Liu and Cherng realized that in order to further address their research study and focus on the holistic and comprehensive view of the mechanisms of Chinese immigrants outlook on immigration and education - in a deeper ethnographic/ anthropological / sociological way - it is very important that the two understand and expand this study to understand not just the immigrants here in the US, but their sending families - the roots of where the families came from in China.