William Hurst works on labor politics, contentious politics, political economy, and the politics of law and legal institutions, principally in China and Indonesia. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the comparative politics of law and legal institutions in China and Indonesia since 1949. For this work, he has completed more than one year of fieldwork in each country since 2006. He has been at Northwestern University since 2013 before he was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford and an assistant professor at the Universities of Texas and Toronto.