Wendy Sung joins the faculty of UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
UCLA Arts welcomes a new member to the faculty of the school’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance: Assistant Professor Wendy Sung.
Wendy is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator trained in critical ethnic studies, digital and media studies, and American studies. Her work sits at the intersection of comparative histories of racialization in the U.S., transmedia histories and digital culture, and the dynamics of visuality and cultural memory. Informed by feminist and critical race studies, Sung has examined varied visual media such as street art, reality television, Twitter, chatbot technologies, and biometrics, to name a few.
Her first book project, Violent Virality: Racial Violence and the Making of New Media examines the relationships between race, technology, and media cultures through the phenomenon of watching racial violence in 20th and 21st century American culture. She is also at work on a second book project tentatively titled, Faciality/Raciality: The Asian Face as Technological Object, which examines the ways that the Asian face, in its racialized logics of non-recognition—indistinguishability and inscrutability— functions as an unacknowledged foundational subject for facial recognition technologies. She has published and has forthcoming work in Social Text, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal), Feminist Media Histories, Hyperrhiz, and the anthologies Global Asian American Popular Cultures and African Americans and Popular Culture.
Prior to joining the WACD faculty, she held appointments as an assistant professor of critical media studies at UT Dallas and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in UC Riverside’s Media and Cultural Studies department. She was the recipient of the Institute of Citizens and Scholars’ (formerly The Woodrow Wilson Foundation) One-Year Career Enhancement Fellowship. She received her Ph.D. from University of Michigan’s Department of American Culture.
Wendy, whose appointment was confirmed last academic year, began teaching in the department this past fall. Her current courses include Race, Nation, and Media Histories and Visual Cultures: The Politics of Looking. Wendy will be teaching both undergraduate and graduate students in the department.
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