Shengqing Wu

Professor Shengqing Wu serves as a Professor in the Division of Humanities at a university of science and technology, specializing in the intersection of Chinese literature, visual media, and sensory experience. Her current research examines how transnational text-image flows mediated modern romantic love and reinvented sensory perception in 20th-century China.

Her scholarship investigates poetry-photography negotiations during late Qing and early Republican eras, analyzing how Chinese aesthetic traditions informed photographic practices to enable artistic innovation and embodied experience. In her 2020 monograph Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture (Columbia University Press), she demonstrates this through case studies like Lu Xun's 1903 portrait-poem inscription, exemplifying the 'writing about the portrait of the self' genre. As a humanities educator at a science-technology institution, she challenges students to explore technology-language dynamics and poetry's material durability against temporal erosion.

• National Humanities Center Fellow (2024-2025): Developing new research on touch/sensory experience and mediated romantic love.