In Memoriam: Jing Wang

Submitted by Emma Teng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We note with great sadness the passing of Professor Jing Wang on July 25. Professor Wang was the S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Languages and Culture at MIT, having previously taught at Duke University (1985-2001) and Middlebury College (1982-1985). She served as Head of Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT from 2005 to 2008, and as Director of the Institute of Civic Communication at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China from 2011 to 2013. Wang is widely known for her scholarship on topics ranging from Chinese literature, to media, advertising, and activism. Her books include The Story of Stone (1992), which was awarded an AAS Joseph Levenson Book Prize; High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (1996), Brand New China (2009), and The Other Digital China: Nonconfrontational Activism on the Social Web (2019). With Chinese collaborators, Wang also founded the nonprofit project NGO2.0 to help local Chinese grassroots organizers use social media to be change agents. She served on the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.

We mourn Jing Wang’s passing and extend our deepest condolences to her family and friends.

Please see the MIT obituary here.