Faculty & Instructors

Biography

I am a scholar of Chinese and global media and cultural studies, with a focus on how critical media cultures emerged, spread, and generated new conditions for intervention and togetherness during drastic social changes. My research takes to heart the affective lived experiences of the plural Chinese and Asian worlds as the starting points for making globally-relevant media and political theories. My current book project, Documentation as Transmedial Relay, examines the dispersion of documentary practices across Chinese film, literature, podcast, digital video, and social media as a collective response to structural shifts of globalization from the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession to the pandemic era. By tracing how diverse cultural producers updated their tools of documentation across media and devised strategies to capture radical sociopolitical changes, this project reconceptualizes documentation as a transmedial and open-ended process of social engagement for theorizing and archiving contemporary global politics.

For the longer term, I am in the process of developing two new projects. The first one traces how global popular music flows such as disco, hip hop, and bubblegum pop crossed the Iron Curtain and entered the Chinese mediascapes from the 1980s to the 2000s. Remapping a history of media technological changes and geopolitical crossings, this project reflects on how imaginations of belonging and globality were shaped and conditioned from the dusk of the Cold War to the height of neoliberal globalization.

Another project, Ruinated Futurity, studies the media afterlives of industrial ruins across the transcultural landscapes of Rust Belt America, post-Cold War Europe, and post-socialist China. This project thinks intimately with the lived experiences of diverse social agents from techno ravers to laid-off workers. In the context of contemporary global economic recession and political precarity, it tells stories of dignity, creative agency, and interconnectedness from post-industrial heartlands as sources of struggle and audacity for the making of alternative futures.

I received my B.A. at Vassar College and my Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine. My own educational experiences in both a small liberal arts college and a big public university have shaped my strong belief in meaningful student-teacher relationships and motivated me to support my students to engage with the world with wonder, care, and imaginations of better futures. In 2023-26, I was a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, where I was actively involved in conversations about Asia, media, theory, and transcultural comparison.

Selected Publications

Special Issue

• “Interrogating Futurity in Contemporary China: Towards Plural Horizons of Political Imagination,” China Perspectives, issue 135 (2023), co-edited with Xiaobo Yuan.

Articles

• “Remix: Recycling the 1990s in Chinese Digital Media,” in Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media, eds. Carlos Rojas, Yomi Braester, and Jinying Li, New York: Oxford University Press, 2026. In press.
• “Re-Shuffle: How Do We Do Contemporary Global Art, Theory, and Politics Today?,” ASAP/Review (2025).
• “Ruinated Futurity: The ‘Dongbei Renaissance,’ Literature, and Memory in the Digital Age,” China Perspectives, issue135 (2023): 51-60.
• “Archives of the Future: Documentary Impulse in a Time of Crisis,” positions politics:episteme, issue 2 (May 2020).
• “CUT! Community, Immunity, Vulnerability in the Time of Coronavirus,” Foundry (March 2020).