Tim Shao-Hung Teng

Tim Shao-Hung Teng is a doctoral candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where he holds a Presidential Fellowship. His research focuses on the ecological surroundings and material underpinnings of East Asian media culture from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, with broader interests in infrastructure studies, animation studies, media archaeology, queer theory, and the legacies of critical theory (poststructuralism and psychoanalysis in particular) in the age of anthropogenic climate change. He is at work writing a dissertation titled "Earthbound Mediation: Geological Entanglements in Sinophone Extractive Zones," which studies the sites of earth material extraction and their entanglements with media technology from frontier to hinterland China, from archipelagic to estuarine Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Looking at four historical sites of salt, coal, oil, and metal extraction, this project brings together an assortment of materials—film, photography, literature, oral history, technical manuals, archaeological and pedagogical projects—that puts our current Age of Extraction into geopolitical and media cultural perspective.

In addition to his book-length project, Teng has published on a wide range of topics concerning materiality, infrastructure, and ecology in East Asian media culture. Recent publications in peer-reviewed journals include: "Archaeology of the Eyeball: Lu Xun, Eye-gouging Myth, and Ocular Anatomy" (positions: asia critique, 2023); "The Motorcycle Diaries of a Topolect Cinema" (Screen, 2023); "Time, Disaster, New Media: Your Name as a Mind-game Film" (New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2022); "Murderous Shadows, Terrifying Air: Dr. Caligari in China" (Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2020); "Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? Reinventing Intermedial Urban Space in Early 1980s Taiwan" (Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2017). A chapter on the encounter of animation and animism through the folk religious figure known as the psychic granny is forthcoming in the edited volume Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion. For a sampling of Teng's writings, please visit his academia.edu profile.

Teng's research has been supported by the Mahindra Humanities Center Interdisciplinary Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Harvard University Asia Center, China Times Cultural Foundation, and the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. Prior to joining Harvard, he received an MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University and an MA and a BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University. His curatorial experiences include internship in the Department of Film at MoMA in NYC as well as ongoing collaboration with Harvard Film Archive on East Asian film programs.