Dr Panpan Yang

An interdisciplinary scholar by training, Panpan Yang works at the intersections of media studies, art history, East Asian studies, and digital humanities. 

Her research demonstrates a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to archival research, material practices, close visual analysis, computer-aided vision, cultural ethnography, and cross-cultural modes of theorisation. 

Panpan joined SOAS as a lecturer (assistant professor) in 2021. In her first academic monograph, Animation Thinks: A Story of Media Entanglements in China (University of California Press, 2026), she traces the history of Chinese animation from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on animation’s encounters with other artforms, including photography, painting, calligraphy, and porcelain. She proposes a form of trans-spatial thinking to examine Chinese animation: to trace, document, and explain how the meaning of a work of Chinese animation subtly changes when it moves in and out of the world of the film industry, the art sphere, and other spaces.   

With Shane McCausland, she was the Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project on calligraphic imagination in modern China (2023-25). Expanding inquiries into our digital present and future, she was a collaborating partner on the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded digital humanities research ‘The Media Ecology Project.’ Her research has also been supported by the Getty Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Sino-British Fellowship Trust, and others.    

Panpan’s creative work also extends across a variety of disciplines and media, including poetry, film, installation, and artist’s books. She is the recipient of China’s National Young Screenwriter Award, the Domitor Essay Award, the Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award Nomination, and an Honourable Mention from the Association for Chinese Animation Studies, and among other awards.   

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Her areas of academic interests include  

• media theory 
• art theory 
• animation  
• digital media 
• AI and the image 
• disinformation and misinformation 
• the arts and visual cultures of China and the Sinophone world  
• modern and contemporary art  
• cultural exchanges between East and Southeast Asia  
• cultural flows  
• water, wind, stone, and mushroom  
• eco-humanities  
• medium and materiality  
• image and text 
• gender and genre  
• intermediality  
• site-specificity  
• Chinese literature  
• experimental poetry 
• studies of Dream of the Red Chamber 
• ethnic minorities in China  
• Xiqu performance  
• Teochew opera, film, and material cultures  
• book culture