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 serves on the Global Studies Coordinating Committee.
Yang is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (Indiana University Press, 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 is currently at work on two new projects. The first, tentatively titled Disorienting Politics: Rising China and Chimerican Media, explores the economic, political, and cultural implications of China’s “rise” from the critical perspectives of transnational media and cultural studies. The second project, Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South, examines the first Special Economic Zone located in southern China as a media-architectural nexus that straddles globalizations from “above” and “below.”
Yang’s scholarship on such topics as branding, internet censorship, food and media, “fiscal orientalism,” and Shenzhen urbanism has appeared in 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.