Yijun Sun
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies
Digital Media, Media History and Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Feminist Technoscience, Material and Visual Culture, Media Infrastructures and Logistics.
I work at the intersections of media theory, history, and science and technology studies, with a focus on the history of digital and visual media. My research asks how technical media take shape in the modern era by attending to the often-overlooked material supports and embodied practices that make their formation and operation possible. I have written on the histories of architectures, screens, and feminist carrier bag theory to explore how bodies, objects, and media forms interact in ways that foreshadow digital technology and shape how we understand technology today. I am completing a monograph, Media Vessels: A History of Carriers, Interfaces, and Media Environments, which reframes the history of electronic media—from eighteenth-century electrostatic experiments to twentieth-century computing and interface design—by foregrounding vessels as central technical supports across multiple scales. In this work, I reposition the vessel as a feminist figure of carrier technics, whose recursive operations of carrying sustain and reshape the ground for the collective.
My work has been supported by the CRC Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen and the Hagley Museum and Library, and published in Cultural Critique, Convergence, and Technics: Media in the Digital Age.
At Wellesley College, I teach across media studies, screen cultures, artificial intelligence, and film. My courses bring theory, history, and creative practice into dialogue, inviting students to approach media not only as objects of study but as practices to be lived and made. Before coming to Wellesley, I taught at the University of Richmond and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Recent Publications:
“Carried Away: The Carrier Bag Theory of Media.” (w/ Bernard D. Geoghegan) In Technics: Media in the Digital Age, “The Key Debates” series, edited by Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever. Amsterdam University Press (Peer-reviewed), 2024 pp. 169-186. https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789048564552/technics
“From Glows to Graphics: The Invention of Visuality in Early Electronic Media Systems.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol 29, issue 5, 2023, pp. 1136-1150. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231193954
“The Desire to See: Binary Systems, Architectural Space, and the Ontology of Being-with.” Cultural Critique, issue 118, 2023, pp. 1-22. DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.0007
Education
- B.A., Beijing Normal University (北京师范大学)
- M.A., Beijing Normal University (北京师范大学)
- Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst