Portia Jin Xiong (she/her) is a JD/PhD candidate at Northwestern University in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include the anthropology of law, gender, race, class, and higher education.
Xiong’s dissertation, “Admitted but Not Advanced: Diversity, Minor Feelings, Asian and Asian American Law Students in the United States,” investigates the structural barriers to equal opportunity and full inclusion in legal education and the legal profession faced by Asians and Asian Americans. The backdrop for her dissertation is the paradoxical double stereotypes depicting Asians as both the successfully assimilated “model minority” and the unassimilable “perpetual foreigner” amid the rise in anti-Asian violence in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Xiong received her BA in Chinese Language and Literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University and her MA in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
From 2023 to 2025, Portia was an ABF/AccessLex Institute Doctoral Fellow in Legal and Higher education. As a visiting scholar, she plans to complete her dissertation by spring 2026.