Jianqing Chen joined WashU in fall 2021 as a joint hire in EALC and FMS, in conjunction with the Arts & Sciences Digital Transformation Hiring Initiative.
Jianqing Chen received her PhD in Film and Media with a Designated Emphasis on Critical Theory from University of California, Berkeley in 2021. Her fields of research and teaching cover cinema and media culture in China, Hongkong, and Taiwan, new media technologies and aesthetics, surveillance, global techno-capitalism, post-socialist culture and critique, and feminist media theory. Combining a global perspective with a critical race and gender approach, her research explores popular emergent media and their roles in creating new modes of subjectivity and subjectivization in post-socialist China.
She is working on a book project which examines the global dissemination of touchscreen media and their radical transformation of our interactions with media objects. With an emphasis on tactile sensations and hand movements, this project disrupts the ocular-centric conception of the screen as an optical apparatus and reconceptualizes the spectator as the user-spectator. Foregrounding contemporary Chinese touchscreen media practices, this project not only examines how touchscreen media became diversified through multicultural implementation, but also investigates drastic changes that touchscreen media has brought to Chinese user-spectators’ individual subjectivity and collective activity in post-socialist era. Her other research interests include the intermedial dynamics between literary and visual cultures, onscreen representations of sex, (live) streaming media and questions of real time, and digital infrastructures and rural revitalization in contemporary China.