Mary Shi

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology and LSA Collegiate Fellow at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. My research interests span historical and political sociology; political economy; science, knowledge, and technology studies; social theory; and public sociology. I received my PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2024 and a BA in Political Science and Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics from Yale University in 2014.

My work puts land at the center of American state formation to rethink the origins of political and economic modernity. More specifically, I examine the role land sale schemes and large scale infrastructure projects such as the Erie Canal and first transcontinental railroad played in establishing the American administrative state and stimulating American economic growth. In doing so, I reveal the way in which dispossessed Indigenous lands were woven into American public finance as the “public lands,” and the centrality of territory management concerns–such as infrastructure promotion–in American state formation. I am currently working on a book project based on this research, as well as investigating the global implications of this American model of infrastructure-led development, from macroeconomic planning in the New Deal to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This research won the 2025 ASA Dissertation Award and the 2025 Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award from the Comparative-Historical Section of the American Sociological Association.  

In other work, with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), I analyzed the San Francisco Bay Area’s transformation as a knowledge economy hub and the new geographies of opportunity and precarity that resulted. As a collective of scholars, artists, and activists, AEMP privileges the perspectives of those most directly affected by displacement to build knowledge of the housing crisis from the ground up that can act as counter-narratives to dominant policy discourses. This work has resulted in, among other publications and projects, a collaboratively published book, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021).

My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Tobin Project, among others. My research and writing have been published in Politics & Society, ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies, Environment & Planning D: Society and Space, the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, and Contemporary Sociology, and has won awards from the American Sociological Association section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology, and Honorable Mentions from the Theory section and the Comparative-Historical Sociology sections. I have been an invited speaker at venues from the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, to Urban Planning at MIT, and the Museum of Capitalism. 

You can view my CV here.