Fan Yang (杨帆) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). An interdisciplinary scholar, Yang works at the intersection of cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonialism/postsocialism, and contemporary China. She is a faculty affiliate in the Asian Studies program and the Ph.D. program in Language, Literacy, and Culture, and serves on the Global Studies Coordinating Committee.
Yang is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016). (Check out her Interview and Podcast on the book.) Complicating the prevalent story of China’s economic rise from the perspective of cultural change, the book argues that WTO-era China’s contested encounter with the globalizing intellectual property regime illuminates the nation’s cultural dilemma in the twenty-first century.
Yang’s new book (forthcoming 2024), Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements, explores the economic, political, and cultural implications of China’s “rise” from the critical perspectives of transnational media and cultural studies. She is also at work on a new project, Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South, which examines the first Special Economic Zone located in southern China (now envisioned as part of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay) as a media-infrastructural complex that straddles globalizations from “above” and “below.”
Yang’s scholarship on such topics as nation branding, internet censorship, food and media, “fiscal orientalism,” media and environment, and Shenzhen urbanism has appeared in Cultural Studies, Environmental Humanities, City, Culture & Society, Theory, Culture & Society, New Media & Society, positions: asia critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Journal of Asian American Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, antiTHESIS, among others. Yang obtained her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, where she was the recipient of a High Potential Fellowship. She also holds an MA from the Ohio State University and a BA from Fudan University, Shanghai.