Chien-Juh Gu received her Ph.D. in sociology from Michigan State University in 2004. Before joining Western Michigan University, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, a scholar-in-residence at American University, and a visiting assistant professor at Northern Illinois University.

Dr. Gu’s research interests include social psychology, gender, social inequality, medical sociology, and international migration. She is the author of Mental Health among Taiwanese Americans: Gender, Immigration, and Transnational Struggles (2006. In the New Americans series, edited by Steve Gold and Rubén Rumbaut. New York: The LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 305pp.). In this book, Dr. Gu examines how Taiwanese Americans’ immigration history, gender, and social relations affect their psychological well-being. She argues that power relations interplay with transnational cultural identification in producing gendered experiences of distress as well as individual variations in different social contexts. Both men and women struggle with their Americaness and their Taiwaneseness in everyday life, and the severity of such struggles varies depending on the power hierarchies between them and with whom they interact.

Dr. Gu has published articles in the areas of social psychology, gender, and culture. Her research interests in social psychology include mental health, social interaction, social perceptions, social attitudes, identity, conformity, and social psychology of health care. She is particularly interested in exploring gender differences and cross-cultural perspectives.

In the area of gender and feminism, Dr. Gu is interested in gender and mental health, gendered power relations, and standpoint feminism. Her current research examines both the gendered transition and the gendered struggles among Taiwanese immigrants in the process of settlement.

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