Zhifan Sheng

Zhifan Sheng is a doctoral student in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at UW Seattle. He is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Cinema and Media Studies. He is interested in how the interaction between different media forms is laden with social and cultural meanings of communication and transmission. His dissertation project centers on media history of Chinese letters and epistolary writings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on cases ranging from the lithographic reproduction of calligraphic letters in the late Qing to the remediation of queer letters in contemporary new media arts, the project explores the shifting cultural and technological underpinnings for letters as a medium in modern China. His second project is about queer death in Sinophone media cultures.