ABOUT

Hello! Welcome to this space!

I am pursuing the joint Ph.D. degree in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. My research mainly focuses on how the more-than-human may help expand our understanding of cinema & media and sovereignty in the context of East Asia, especially China and Japan. More about my research.

Before transferring my doctoral degree to UChicago, I obtained Ph.D. candidacy in East Asian Studies at McGill University in August 2019 (Main Field: Critical Asian Media Studies; Minor Fields: Chinese Film and Media & The Animal and Sovereignty). I am including my reading lists here in case other people are also interested in these fields.

I also hold an M.Phil. degree in Humanities from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a BA degree in Communication from Xiamen University. I stayed for a semester in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University as an exchange student and visited Shanghai Jiao Tong University for research.

I am a native speaker of Southwestern Mandarin, so I tend to ignore the /n/ nasal sound in every language and replace it with /l/. I also speak English and Japanese and remain an active learner of Japanese through ACG culture.

Besides my academic life, I enjoy doing creative digital media projects. I learned Python through Digital Studies at UChicago as my program allows us to take programming courses to fulfill the language requirements. This learning experience has been extremely helpful for me to understand digital media for my research and continue developing my video game design skills. I am also taking the course Augmented Reality Production offered by the MAAD center, and have started experimenting with augmented reality with A-Frame, Blender, and Field, a great tool for making digital artworks.

I also do creative writing in Chinese and weird languages I invented for myself. As a poetry enthusiast, I was one of the “Best Modern Chinese Poetry Award” recipents at the Global Chinese Poetry Competition when I was a college student.