Meng Li
Del Rey South
Email: Meng.Li@lmu.edu
Dr. Meng Li is an Associate Professor in the Communication Studies Department, where she regularly teaches courses in the Department’s Relational Communication concentration, such as Relational Communication, Relationships in Context, and Global Intimacies. Born and raised in Zhengzhou, a metropolis in Central China’s Yellow River Valley, Professor Li attended college in Beijing and went on to pursue her graduate studies in the United States in 2008. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa before joining LMU as an assistant professor in 2015.
Professor Li’s scholarly work examines the interplay between micro-level communication phenomena and macro-level social changes in contemporary China. She has studied, for example, the relational consequences of rural-urban migration on migrant families, public discourses and media representations of the family as manifestations of social change as well as the changing mobility cultures, infrastructures, and politics in China. Professor Li received two distinguished dissertation fellowships for her ethnographic research in China on rural migrant workers’ annual family reunions during the Chinese Lunar New Year and her scholarly work has won multiple top paper awards from the National Communication Association (NCA), including, most recently, the Top Paper from the Family Communication Division in 2021. In addition to publishing in peer-reviewed journals, Professor Li has also written for public audiences on issues of migration and mobility in both English and Chinese.
A trained ethnographer and a cultural analyst, Professor Li is passionate about learning about people from diverse cultural backgrounds through communal living and daily interactions. She and her husband Yazhou Liu, a scholar of media and journalism, are thrilled to be part of LMU’s housing community and look forward to serving and supporting our students on their academic journeys and beyond. Professor Li is an amateur cook, yogi, pianist, and traveler who enjoys talking about how to do everything she loves badly.