Shaoling Ma

BRIEF BIO

Shaoling Ma is an Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Singapore, spent ten years in the United States where she obtained her PhD (University of Southern California, Comparative Literature), and subsequently taught at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include literary and critical theory, media studies, and global Chinese literature, film, and art. She has published in academic journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Configurations, Mediations, and positions. Her first book manuscript, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 is forthcoming in 2021 with Duke University Press as part of the ‘Sign, Storage, Transmission’ series.

CURRENT AND FUTURE PROJECTS

Ma’s research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century to contemporary global Chinese literature and culture, critical and post-critical theory’s interrogations of history, subjectivity, materiality, media, and technology. She is currently pursuing a second project on the recursions of digitality in contemporary media studies and global China, and has an article under review on big Earth data in the PRC’s digital Belt and Road Initiative. Ma recently presented in the Recursive Colonialism symposium where she discussed the intersections of media and visual studies, diasporic politics, and area studies in critical approaches to the ongoing Uyghur crisis in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region (XUAR).

RECENT REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS

1. (Forthcoming in May 2021) Duke University Press. The Stone and the Wireless, Mediating China, 1861-1909.

2. “Pauses, Cuts, and Static Interference: The Media Forms of Merger and Separation in Malaysia and Singapore.” positions: asia critique, 28.4 (December 2020): 841-868. Print.

3. “Stone, Jade, Medium: A Neocybernetics New Story of the Stone (1905-1906).” Configurations, 26.1 (Winter 2018): 1-26. Print.

4. “To Compare Otherwise: Dialectics and The Work of Comparison in Structural Totality.” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, 31. 1 (Fall 2017). Online. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/compare-otherwise

5. “’A Tale of New Mr. Braggadocio’: The ‘Social Brain’ of Late Qing Chinese Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies. Special issue on China, 40.2 (2013): 55-72. Print.