Jing Wang

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Jing Wang is a professor of Chinese media and cultural studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also the founder and director of MIT New Media Action Lab. Wang established NGO2.0, a digital literacy program that trains grassroots nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the underdeveloped regions of China to use social media. She studies social media and nonprofit technology and their impact on civic communities and communication.

At Radcliffe, Wang is examining the emergence of a particular brand of information and communications technology activism that promotes the use of social media as a means of helping NGOs break out of their communication and technology bottleneck. She will map out the ecosystem of this new terrain of activism in China—both its possibilities and limits.

Wang is most recently the author of Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture (Harvard University Press, 2008). Her book The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and the Journey to the West (Duke University Press, 1992) won her a Joseph Levenson Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the editor or coeditor of three other books and two issues of the journal positions: asia critique. She has been a fellow of the National Humanities Center and received grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Henry Luce Foundation. Wang earned her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.