Center Affiliates
Dan Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Richmond. Her research examines media politics, public opinion, local governance, and cultural politics in contemporary China. She is the author of Convenient Criticism: Local Media and Governance in Urban China (2020, SUNY Press). She has published articles on various topics including political trust, media effects on public opinion, local television news, state-media relationship, state capacity, and local governance. Currently, she is extending her research to examine the political ramifications of cultural production with a focus on how standup comedy transgresses the state rhetoric in public discourse. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Kansas. In 2018, she was a visiting fellow at the China Studies Centre, the University of Sydney. From 2021 to 2023, she is a Public Intellectuals Program (PIP) Fellow with the National Committee on US-China Relations.
Dennis Lo is an Associate Professor of Global Cinemas in the English Department at James Madison University. He received a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at UCLA in 2015, and currently teaches histories of global cinema, new media theories, media industries, and transnational authors and genres, with a specific focus on Chinese-language cinemas. His research explores the intersections of Chinese-language film aesthetics, cultural geography, cinematic ecocriticism, media anthropology, and critical theories of extended reality (XR) media. His first monograph, The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinemas (2020), explores the politics and aesthetics of rural location shooting in Chinese-language cinemas. His work has also been published as a chapter in Production Studies, The Sequel!, as well as in numerous refereed journals, including New Cinemas, Film-Philosophy, and Asian Cinema. He is currently shooting a series of experimental, location-shot XR video essays that combine emerging technologies of mixed reality, 360 VR, and photogrammetric 3D scans. The research findings from these video essays will directly inform his second book project, which theorizes eco-critical and community-centered approaches to spatial computing.
Emily Matson is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the School of Foreign Service and the History Department at Georgetown University. This year, she is also a Council on Foreign Relations education ambassador, and she is also a former Wilson Center China fellow. While at the Wilson Center, she published a policy paper titled "From Regional to National: Northeastern Scholars and the National Discourse on the War of Resistance against Japan." Dr. Matson received a PhD in Modern Chinese History from UVA in fall 2020, and her areas of expertise include Chinese history, Japanese history, and historical memory. For her dissertation, she researched World War II museums in Northeastern China and the evolution of their exhibits over time. Dr. Matson is also an active contributor to NuVoices, an international editorial collective dedicated to promoting research on China from women and marginalized groups.
Clyde Yicheng Wang is an assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University. His research focuses on ideology, propaganda, and media politics in China. Clyde obtained a PhD in political science at Boston University. His academic articles have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as the Journal of Contemporary China, the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, Nations and Nationalism, and Political Communication. He is currently working on a book project that examines the collaboration between China’s propaganda, media market, and public discourse. Apart from his scholarly work, he also writes as a columnist for several Chinese language media, including The Paper (Pengpai Xinwen) and The Initium (Duan Chuanmei).
Emily Wilcox 魏美玲 is Margaret Hamilton Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures/Chinese Studies at William & Mary and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Dance Studies. Wilcox is core faculty in the Program in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and affiliate faculty in the Program in Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies and the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Wilcox is also a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, where she was previously tenured Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies before joining William & Mary in January 2021.
Wilcox earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard University, her MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Wilcox has been a visiting graduate student and Fulbright Scholar at the Beijing Dance Academy, an international postdoctoral research fellow at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and visiting graduate faculty at Minzu University of China. She received grants from the Blakemore Foundation, University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Wilson Center, National Committee on US-China Relations Public Intellectuals Program, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar Program, and the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. At Michigan, Wilcox directed the PhD program in Asian studies and was Associate Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. At William & Mary, Wilcox served as Interim Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and Director of the Chinese Studies Program.
Wilcox is an award-winning scholar of modern and contemporary China with a focus on dance and performing arts, film and media, and cultural history. Wilcox has authored, co-edited, or translated six books: Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (University of California Press, 2018; Winner of the 2019 de la Torre Bueno Prize® from the Dance Studies Association); Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia (co-edited with Katherine Mezur, University of Michigan Press, 2020); 革命的身体：重新认识当代中国舞蹈文化(Li Hongmei, trans., Fudan University Press, 2023); Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method (co-edited with Soo Ryon Yoon, Routledge, 2023); Teaching Film from the People’s Republic of China (co-edited with Zhuoyi Wang and Hongmei Yu, Modern Language Association, 2024); and Creating with Roots: Contemporary Chinese National Folk Dance Choreography (authored by Rui Xu; Emily Wilcox, trans.). Professor Wilcox is co-creator with Liangyu Fu of the University of Michigan Chinese Dance Collection and author of more than thirty articles and book chapters in English and Chinese. She is currently writing a book about international dance exchanges and South-South solidarity in China during the Cold War. A complete list of Wilcox’s publications can be found here.
Wilcox teaches courses and advises undergraduate and graduate research in Chinese studies, Asian and Asian diaspora studies, and dance and performance studies at William & Mary and around the globe. For more information, see Emily Wilcox’s C.V.
Weile (Wendy) Zhou is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia. As a critical-cultural scholar, she researches the reconfigurations of the digital public sphere and transnational journalism industries in the age of AI and geopolitical turbulence, with a focus on Chinese and American contexts. She is currently developing a book on the community of Chinese transnational journalists, examining their news practices, labor conditions, and career paths amid evolving local-global media hybridity.
Previously, Wendy served as a postdoctoral research associate at UVA’s East Asia Center and Miller Center, and as a lecturer in media studies (2024–2025). She holds a PhD in communication from Georgia State University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Hong Kong.
As a freelance writer, editor, and researcher, Wendy has contributed to nonprofits and media outlets including, but not limited to, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Financial Times, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Quartz, the Global Investigative Journalism Network, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Caixin Media, and others. As a researcher, she has published in The China Journal, Asian Journal of Communication, Canadian Review of Sociology, and other journals and edited volumes in China studies, Asian studies, and the broader fields of communication, journalism, and migration.