Shaoling Ma

Overview

I am an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese literature, culture, and history, in particular the technical mediation of East and Southeast Asia. 

My first book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021) asks what media studies can gain conceptually from the last few decades of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912), and what this politicized and semicolonial phase of Chinese history looks like when reviewed from the new and mostly foreign communicative technologies of its time such as telegraphy, telephony, phonography, and photography. The Stone and the Wireless argues that when Chinese intellectuals, writers, and revolutionaries wrote and illustrated their encounters with these devices, they inadvertently challenged existing notions of politics, tradition, and science, and thus reconfigured new sites of ideological struggle.

I am currently working on my second book, tentatively titled Asia in Loops, which studies how computational data processing aiding East and Southeast Asian capitalist accumulation and state rationalization transformed rural lives and environments from the late 1950s to the contemporary period. Topics for other concurrent projects include intersections of gender, media, and labor; cybernetics and systems thinking in socialist, post-socialist, and decolonizing Asian states; video art and cinema; and Marxism. I am member of the Advisory Board for the Technicities book series, Edinburgh University Press, and serve on the main Editorial Board for Cultural Politics, Duke University Press; re:criticism, Pennsylvania State University Press; Power Currents: Asian Media in the World, University of Pittsburgh Press; and World Picture, University of Toronto Press. I am Book Review Editor (film/media studies/drama) for the journal, MCLC: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. 

Born in Taiwan, I grew up in Singapore where I obtained my B.A. and M.A. at the National University of Singapore. I then spent a decade in the U.S. where I earned my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California (2012) and had my first faculty position in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University (2013-15). Prior to joining Cornell University, I was Associate Professor of Literature at Yale-NUS College and the National University of Singapore.  

Research Focus

Cinema and Media Studies; Marxism; Early computing and rural change; late nineteenth-century to contemporary China; Taiwan-Singapore-Malaysia studies