Joint Program PhD Candidate in EALC & CMS
I have been continuously fascinated with how the moving image mediates and makes the self. My dissertation, Switch-Montage: Self Media Aesthetics in China’s Internet+ Era, zooms in on a singular formal technique that defines but also extends beyond vlogging practices — the montaged switches between filming one’s surroundings and filming oneself — and examines how this gesture becomes implicated in processes of self formation in mainland China, post-2015. Bringing digital media and transmedial aesthetics into conversation with moving image production and distribution complexes, platformative media ecologies, and theories of state power, what I call switch-montagebecomes a hinge for understanding how subjectivity assembles across official and less official, Chinese and global media infrastructures as well as extended media lineages.
Broadly, I work across film and media studies as well as modern Chinese culture. Specific research and teaching interests span genre, affect, aesthetic and ecological theory; contemporary re-conceptualizations of collectivity as well as public space; state power; the platform economy; socialist and post-socialist era Chinese film and TV; Asian American media; and Cold War politics.
In my free time, I enjoy reading for pleasure, watching vlogs (surprise!), and obsessively hoarding niche perfume samples. One simply has to smell them all.
Selected Publications
“ ‘The most calming thing you have done on the internet’: Healing Vlogs and the Aesthetics of Li Ziqi,” Medical Culture in East Asian Cinema and Media (eds. Ling Zhang, Pao-chen Tang, Yuqian Yan), Hong Kong University Press (2025)
Co-authored, “ ‘Hello My Chinese Spy, Take My Data’: Welcome to the Playground of the Digital Cold War,”positions politics: praxis, January 2025.
“When State-Endorsed Cinema Meets Marvel: A Study of Wolf Warrior II’s Global Superhero Vernacular” Arts 12, no. 6: 252 (2023) https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12060252
Under review. “Homing Dispersion: The Digitally Diasporic Aesthetics of Healing Vlogs,” Cultural Politics.