Ruoyun Bai


Professor of Comparative Literature and Arts, Culture, and Media (UTSC)
Affiliation
PhD

BaiContact Information

Email: rbai@utsc.utoronto.ca
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Bio & Research

My teaching and research revolve around media as institutional, textual, and cultural practices and as technologies of mediation. I am attentive not only to textual and visual representations, but also to the materiality of such representations, i.e. how texts and images are produced and circulated in historically specific political, economic, social, ideological, and technological contexts. My scholarship so far has focused on postsocialist China and its mediatized politics. I have co-edited two books: Television Drama in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) and Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2014). My monograph, Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics, came out from the University of British Columbia Press in 2015. I have published articles in areas such as the political economy of Chinese television, the relationship of Chinese writers and intellectuals to the market and the state, and the Internet-based youth culture in China. Currently, I am moving on to explore the implications of a media framework for established disciplines such as comparative literature, cinema studies, and history. Informed by the burgeoning scholarship of media archaeology, comparative media studies, and digital humanities, I ask how the medium in which a text is embedded – be it the scroll, the codex, the book, the electronic, or the digital – matters to its production and consumption, with what kinds of political and cultural significance.

CV

Recent Publications