Chia-rong Wu

Chia-rong Wu serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, holding this position since June 2019. His academic work centers on Sinophone literature, film, and video games through postcolonial theories, Indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism frameworks.

Dr. Wu earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarly contributions include two monographs: Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020). He has co-edited Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) and is preparing The Southern Discourse in Sinophone Literature: Moving Borders (Routledge, forthcoming September 2025).

His research examines cultural production across Taiwan and the Sinophone world, with particular focus on how literature, film, and video games engage with historical trauma, identity formation, and cultural politics. Recent projects explore youth narratives in Taiwanese horror video games, Indigenous perspectives on Oceanic Taiwan, and the global South discourse in Sinophone literature, revealing connections between transnational migration, racial dynamics, gender politics, and indigenous awareness.

Dr. Wu serves as executive editor and Advisory Board member of Taiwan Lit and the Global Sinosphere (ISSN: 2994-6816), and holds positions on the Board of the American Association for Chinese Studies, the International Advisory Board of Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Approaches to Chinese Literature (Routledge Book Series), and the Cultural History Editorial Advisory Board (Bloomsbury Book Series).

Currently supervising PhD students in Sinophone literary and cultural studies, Dr. Wu is developing a new monograph focused on transmedia narratives of youth politics, continuing his exploration of how contemporary media forms engage with political consciousness and historical memory in Taiwan and beyond.