Ian Rowen is Assistant Professor of Geography and Urban Planning at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and holds courtesy appointments in the School of Art, Design, and Media, and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He has been a a Postdoctoral Fellow at Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and Visiting Scholar at Fudan University (China) and Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany). His research has been supported with a Fulbright Fellowship and multiple US National Science Foundation grants.

Much of his published research has focused on the cultural and political geography of social activism and mobilities that span the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. He is currently conducting a new project on the transnational cultural politics of innovation as imagined and practiced by a variety of state and industry actors in the Asia-Pacific region.

Before earning his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2016, Ian worked as a translator, journalist, musician, tour guide, hotelier and entrepreneur. He received a B.A. with honors in a double major of Mathematics and East Asian Studies (Chinese), as well as the JWT Youngs Mathematics Prize from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2001, for his senior seminar paper entitled, ‘A Tour of the Hyperreals: An Introduction to Non-standard Analysis’.