(wjiang [at] stonybrook [dot] edu) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies at the University at Stony Brook, New York. A graduate from the Departments of English at Peking (Beida) and Nankai Universities. His intellectual interests are on the problems of mediation in textural culture and media studies, modernity and technology, as both aesthetic and socioeconomic phenomena. He is no less interested in the relations between sciences and humanities with regard to their functions in a changing organization of knowledge, namely, the epistemology. The periods and places in which he is working is the British Enlightenment, and the late Imperial through modern China (and East Asia in general), and the transculturation between these two as a way to investigate the aesthetics and ethics of globalization in their emergent form(s) back then and right now. The main genres covered in his work are the systems of the Novel and the early political economy writings.
His Master Thesis is on Oscar Wilde's dandies in late Victorian England.
The working title of his dissertation is "Radicalizing Textual Culture in the Formation of Modern Subject: The Work of Information Upon the Body."
Committed to promoting a diasporic spirit with specific historical and political significance, he works to bring people and things together and does so to help sustain an intellectual ecology. Institutionally he is a member of the Modern Language Association of the States, a Senator in the Graduate Students Organization (GSO) at Stony Brook. Aslo he once was on a search committee for a tenure-tracked position in Chinese film, literature and culture at Stony Brook.
A participant in a blog and a wiki projects, he also teaches literature, film, cultural studies and theories on cross cultural encounters. At this moment, he cannot wait for a visit to Scotland and England in June, presenting on Adam Smith in the University of Glasgow. And the books he is reading are McLuhan, Ong, Derrida, Adela Pinch and Katherine E. Ellison.