Jing Wang, the S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Languages and Culture, and a longtime member of the MIT faculty in Global Studies and Languages and Comparative Media Studies/Writing, passed away on Sunday in Boston after a heart attack.
For decades, Wang was a leading scholar of the intersection of media and activism in China. Following a bachelor’s degree at National Taiwan University, she studied comparative literature at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Massachusetts, where she earned her PhD. She continued her focus on literature at Duke University, where she was faculty for 16 years and authored her first books. 1992’s The Story of Stone, which was awarded a Joseph Levenson Book Prize for the year’s best book on premodern China, explored traditional Chinese literature, but her next book, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (1996), marked a move toward her study of Chinese media more broadly.
Her subsequent work,...
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