Renren Yang works on twentieth-and twenty-first-century Chinese literature, cinema, and popular culture, with a focus on the intersection of literary and media studies. His current book project, “Interface Resonance: A Media Genealogy of Literary Fame in Modern China,” traces the changing concepts, practices, and politics of celebrity authorship throughout modern China with the ongoing shift from the print to the digital regime of letters. He also published articles on Chinese web novels and surveillance cinema. Prior to moving to UBC, he taught in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) and Thinking Matters (a required freshman academic program) at Stanford University.

reinterpretations of modern Chinese literary and filmic canons;
Chinese popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries;
theoretical and historical approaches to celebrity authorship;
material conditions and media forms of literary and cinematic communications.

Journal Articles

“Flat Surface” as Material Metaphor: “Bad” Cover Design, “Good” Storytelling, and Post-Fordist Sensibility in Chinese Web Novels. positions: asia critique, 1 August 2024; 32 (3): 655–684. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-11164537

“Toward a Regime of Emotional Authenticity: Eileen Chang’s Literary Transmediation of Theater and Cinema in Two 1940s Love Stories.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 2023 35 (2): 354–387. https://doi.org/10.3366/mclc.2023.0040

“Reconfiguring Flatness on Screen: A Short History of Cover Designs for Chinese Web Novels”, Electronic Book Review, March 7, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7273/gf8q-8d91

“Buried Alive in History: Poetics, Politics, and Ethics of Time in Startling by Each Step (Bubu jingxin) and other Chinese Time-Travel Historical Romances.” Frontier of Literary Studies in China, 2016 10 (4): 699-742. https://brill.com/view/journals/flsc/10/4/article-p699_9.xml

“Between Languages, Hither or Thither?—A Study of the Use of English and Academic Identities of Chinese Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” second author, Linguistic Research (Issue 7), Institute of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics of Peking University, ed. Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2009: 181-90. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/404092362

Introduction to Special Issue or Edited Anthology

“Introduction: Felicities in Chinese Web Novel Genres,” Guest editor’s Introduction to a special section “New Genres of Chinese Web Novels,” Chinese Literature and Thought Today, 2024 55 (3-4): 4-17.  https://doi.org/10.1080/27683524.2024.2427555

Book Chapters

“Messy Realities and Power Secrecy: Contested and Persistent Presence of Vulgarities in the Governance of Chinese Web Novels.” In Internet Vulgarities in China: Cultures, Governance and Politics, edited by Jian Xu and Dino Ge Zhang. London & New York: Routledge, 2026, 23-49. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003698067-3

“Discreet Camera-Eye, Spectacle, and Stranger Sociality: On the Shift to Prosumer Digital Surveillance in China.” In Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes, edited by Karen Fang. London & New York: Routledge, 2017, 245-68. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315647708

Book Reviews

Review of Laikwan Pang, ONE AND ALL: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. Pacific Affairs, vol. 97, no. 4, December 2024, pp. 854-856. https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/book-reviews/one-and-all-the-logic-of-chinese-sovereignty-by-laikwan-pang/

Review of Sijia Yao, Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. 2023. Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 78 no. 2, 2024, p. 266-269. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rmr.2024.a965341

Other Projects and Writings

如何为“山寨”正名？(How Can We Legitimate “Shanzhai” Culture?) 2024-11-15: https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_29354440

A public-facing Gallery of Chinese Book Cover Art (since 2021): https://chinesebookcover.wordpress.com

再见，唐纳德·斯通：“因我无法为死亡驻足” (Goodbye, Donald Stone: “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”) 2021-02-10: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_11287122

SSHRC Insight Grant: The deaths and rebirths of literary authorship in digital China;

UBC Hampton Research Grant: Paratextual Extensions of Literary Celebrity in Modern China

ASIA 361 Modern Chinese Fictions in Translation II (theme: love and betrayal)

ASIA 355 History of Chinese Cinema (theme: 20th-century sociopolitical transformation)

ASIA 325 Hong Kong Cinema (theme: historical, social, and cultural identities)

ASIA 319 Contemporary Chinese Popular Cultures (theme: genres of pop culture in post-socialist China)

ASIA 321 Celebrity Culture in Chinese Societies (theme: histories and debates from ancient to digital China)

ASIA 443 National Narratives in Chinese Literature and Film (seminar)

ASIA 517 Chinese Media Studies: Theories and Histories (seminar)

ASIA 514B Author, Media, Fame (seminar)