Ruo-Fan Liu

Ruo-Fan Liu is the inaugural Taiwan Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). She earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research explores how Taiwan's holistic admission reforms created uncertainties for students and how parents and teachers leveraged cultural and social capital to restore admissions advantages.

A Fulbright recipient and former Congress party negotiator, Ruo-Fan is also the author of Let the Timber Creek: An Alternative School’s Utopia for Coming Generations, recognized as one of the top ten non-fiction books by China Times. Her work has been published in International Studies in Sociology of Education and Ethnography, and she also investigates transformative meritocracy and credentialism in East Asia.

At APARC, Ruo-Fan is transforming her dissertation, When Ladders Move, into a book manuscript while expanding her research on uncertainty and legitimacy to offer practical recommendations for different nations’ policies and talent flows. Learn more about her work on her website and follow her on X.