Lingjia Xu

Lingjia Xu is a scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese media, literature, and culture. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 2025. She is working on her first book project, tentatively entitled “Mediating Handicraft: The Imagination of Labor in Modern China.” This project explores how cultural creators in mainland China and Taiwan mobilized diverse media to reinvent handicraft as a means of rethinking labor culture in the industrial and digital eras. Xu’s writings have been published or are forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Literature (Wenxue), and other venues.

At Mount Holyoke, Xu teaches courses spanning Chinese and East Asian media, film, literature, and culture, as well as an introductory course in media studies. In her teaching, she collaborates with the Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab, Talcott Greenhouse, Media Teaching Area, and College Art Museum to design hands-on activities that allow students to engage with scholarly texts both experientially and critically. Xu is a recipient of the Nexus Curriculum Development Grant for her course, “Making is Thinking: Craft Cultures in East Asia.”