Yue Hou Named Bers Assistant Professor

Yue Hou, Assistant Professor of Political Science, has been named the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences. Hou is an accomplished scholar of authoritarian politics and the politics of China. Her book, The Private Sector in Public Office: Selective Property Rights in China, addresses how China's private sector manages to grow without secure property rights and proposes a new theory of selective property rights. Her work has appeared in a variety of academic journals, and has been featured in the New York Times, Boston Review, and South China Morning Post. At Penn, she has served as an active faculty member of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and the Penn Identity and Conflict Lab. She is also part of the new Penn Development Research Initiative.

The late Janice Bers graduated from Penn with an education degree in 1939. Her husband, the late Julian Bers, graduated from Wharton in 1931. He received Penn’s Alumni Award of Merit in 1968 and served as a trustee of the University, while Janice Bers served as president of her class and on the 50th reunion gift committee. They established this chair in 1972 to recognize assistant professors who demonstrate outstanding promise as teachers and scholars in the social sciences.