Yu-Jhen Chen / Sociology
Graduate Student Researcher
Started at the NML: April 2024ychen15@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Yu-Jhen Chen is a third-year Ph.D. student in Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on race/ethnicity, culture, inequality, and immigration, with a particular interest in quantitative and computational methods.
Yu-Jhen’s research encompasses multiple projects that mainly examine the relationship between museums and racial minorities in New York City. Her current project centers on investigating racial and national representation within the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This project analyzes how artists’ backgrounds influence exhibition content and representation. By building a comprehensive dataset of MoMA‘s exhibition records from 1929 to 2023, she explores changes in artist representation across different historical periods. Yu-Jhen employs advanced computational analytical techniques, such as Structure Topic Modeling (STM) and Word Embedding, to examine exhibition narratives and their associations with artists’ racial backgrounds. This approach will provide insights into the dynamics of museum exhibitions and their broader social implications.