Professor Shengqing Wu from the Division of Humanities specializes in the intersection of Chinese literature, images, and the media. This academic year, Professor Wu will be a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in the United States, where she will be working on a new project about touch and sensory experience, as well as how modern romantic love was mediated and “reinvented” by the transnational flows of texts and images. 

Previously, Professor Wu’s research project dealt with the interaction between poetry and the visual arts. In particular, she explores the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras. In her book Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture (Columbia University Press, 2020), Professor Wu discusses how the Chinese ways of seeing and aesthetic ideas have informed photographic practices, providing rich sources for artistic innovation, self-expression, and embodied experience amid a modern, image-driven society. She presents a specific example involving a photograph of the iconic poet Lu Xun, taken in Japan in 1903, which inspired him to write a poem inscribed on its back. This image-text practice is emblematic of the distinctive Chinese poetic genre known as "writing about the portrait of the self."

As a humanities educator at a university of science and technology, Professor Wu is also enthusiastic about encouraging her students to explore the relationship between technology and language in everyday life. Apart from cultivating an appreciation of the beauty of language, she asks her students to consider what happens when machinery and poetry meet, and whether a poem presented in a novel material form can withstand the relentless erosion of time.