Kelly Fan

Kelly Fan is a PhD student in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley studying modern Chinese literature and media. Her research seeks to understand materiality of literary form, particularly its discursive and material entwinement with technology, infrastructure, and other media forms. Her current project examines how the advent of telephony evokes a “politics of listening” running counter to a cultural moment fixated on voicing in early twentieth-century China. Her other interests include film, media theory, affect theory, and the phenomenology of reading. She holds a BA in Economics and English from Columbia University (2016) and an MA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley (2021).