Dr. Shaolu Yu is an urban geographer and urban planner. She holds a B.S. in Resources, Environment, Urban Planning and Management (Qufu, China), an M.S. in Urban Geography (Beijing, China), and a Ph.D. in Geography (University of Connecticut, U.S.A). Trained as an urban geographer in an interdisciplinary background and participating in projects in urban studies in China, the U.S., and Canada, she has developed a comparative and global perspective and a mixed method approach in her research on cities. Her papers have been published in the journals Annals of Association of American Geographers, The Professional Geographer, Urban Geography, Geographical Review, Journal of Transport Geography, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Papers in Applied Geography.
Her current research interests include: Urban Space and Place-making, Migration and Mobility, Race and Ethnicity, and Asian Urbanism. She is interested in applying cartography and GIS in visualizing and analyzing spatial data. Her ongoing research projects include "Triangulated Between White and Black: Chinese in the Mid-South" and "Urban Queer Space in the South." She also continues her research interest in Asian Urbanization, particularly the social, cultural, and spatial changes in Asian cities under the impacts of globalization and neoliberalism.
Her course offerings include Urban Planning and Design, Transportation Geography and Planning, GIS applications in Urban Studies, Research Methods in Urban Studies, Globalization and Cities, Asian Urbanization through Cinema, Urban Queer Cinema-a Global Approach, AAPI Experiences through Literature and Film.
Selected Publications
2025: Shaolu Yu., and Han Li. Using film as a pedagogical tool to integrate DEI topics in geography: co-teaching Asian and Asian American geography through cinema. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 1–16.
2025: Shaolu Yu, Aijazi, O., Watson, J. K. A/geography: Unsettling the geographical imagination of global Asias. In T. Chen & C. Eubanks (Eds.), Global Asias: Tactics & theories (pp. 283–346). University of Hawaiʻi Press.
2023: Shaolu Yu: “Racializing Ethnic Entrepreneurship: Chinese Entrepreneurship in the Deep South” The Professional Geographer, 75:1, 175-186. Taylor & Francis.
2022: Shaolu Yu: “Placing Racial Triangulation, Triangulating Place and Race: The Chinese
Grocery Stores in the Mississippi Delta during the Jim Crow Era” Annals of American Association of Geographers, 112:1, 97-122. Taylor & Francis.
2019: Shaolu Yu. “Becoming In/Out of Place: Doing Research in Chinatown as a Chinese Female Geographer in the Era of Transnationalism.” The Professional Geographer, 72:2, 272-282. Taylor & Francis.
2018: Shaolu Yu, Madalyn Bryant, Emily Messmer, Sophie Tsagronis & Sarah Link “Is there a Bubble to Burst?”-College Students’ Spatial Perception of Campus and the City, a Case Study of Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, Urban Geography, 39:10, 1555-1575. Springer.
2018: Shaolu Yu. “We Are All Children of God”: The Intersectionality of Religion, Race/Ethnicity, and Immigration in Chinese Churches in Memphis, Tennessee, Papers in Applied Geography, 4:3, 256-273. Taylor and Francis.
2017: Shaolu Yu. “Mobilocality”, Urban Geography, 39:4, 563-586. Springer.
2017: Shaolu Yu. “That is real America!” Imaginative Geography among the Chinese Immigrants in Flushing, New York City, Geographical Review, 108: 2, 1-25. Wiley.
2017: Lucia Lo, Shaolu Yu, and Wei Li, “Between China and North America: Highly Skilled Chinese Migration” in Lloyd Wong ed. Chinese Mobilities and Canada, University of British Columbia Press, 2017. 138-166.
2016: Shaolu Yu. “'I am like a deaf, a dumb and a crippled': the (Im)mobilities of Recent Chinese Immigrants in Flushing, Queens, New York City." Journal of Transport Geography, 54: 10-21.
2016: Shaolu Yu, and Wei Li, “Mobility, Time and Home: The Experience of Two Generations of Transnational Chinese Geographers” in Marcus. P. Alan ed. Navigating Geography and Self: Transnational Geographers Disrupting Boundaries in a Global Age, Lexington, 2016. 51-68.
