|
To the members of the MIT community,
With great sadness, I share the news that Jing Wang, S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Languages & Culture and professor of Chinese media and cultural studies, died on Sunday following
a sudden health emergency.
Professor Wang’s interests ranged from the classical literature of premodern China – the subject of her first book, the award-winning
The Story of Stone – to groundbreaking work on contemporary Chinese culture, including the role of advertising and the nuanced ways that activists use social media to inspire societal change.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in foreign languages and literatures from National Taiwan University, Jing completed her education in the US, earning her PhD in comparative literature
from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
She spent 16 years on the faculty at Duke, rising to chair the Department of Asian and African Languages and Literature and to direct the Center for East Asian Cultural and Institutional
Studies. In 1996, she published her second solo volume, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China.
In 2001, Jing arrived at MIT, beginning with an appointment in Foreign Languages and Literatures (now Global Languages), a group she would head from 2005 to 2008. Intense and inspiring,
Jing earned the Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest teaching honor in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS), and was a relentless advocate for women in academia.
As she developed her ideas for two more provocative books –
Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture (2008) and
The Other Digital China: Nonconfrontational Activism on the Social Web (2019) – she found an additional intellectual home in Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W). Since 2019, CMS/W was her primary appointment. She also went out of her way to serve
the Institute, including providing guidance to MIT on working in China and, this summer, joining the advisory committee to identify a new dean for SHASS.
You can
read
more about her life and work on MIT News.
Passionate about using knowledge to improve people’s lives, Jing founded the
MIT
New Media Action Lab, to help non-profits and communities in developing countries explore the potential of new media, and launched
NGO
2.0, an ambitious effort based in Beijing and Shenzhen to promote the use of information communication technology to help activists achieve their social goals. On
the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2010, she also chaired the International Advisory Board of
Creative
Commons for China.
Having lost her daughter,
Candy,
tragically two decades ago, Jing was keenly attuned to the struggles of others. Warm, caring and generous, she was a gifted cook who made sure that students from far away had a welcoming place to go for Thanksgiving.
May we honor her memory by making room at our own tables – and by reaching out now to the many friends, colleagues and students grappling with her loss.
With sympathy,
L. Rafael Reif
|
