In Memoriam: Jing Wang, 1950-2021

Jing Wang, the S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Languages and Culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a longtime member of the MIT faculty in Global Studies and Languages and Comparative Media Studies/Writing, passed on August 1 in Boston after suffering a heart attack. She was 71 years old.

After earning a bachelor’s degree at National Taiwan University, she studied comparative literature at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Massachusetts, where she earned her Ph.D. She continued her focus on literature at Duke University, where she was on the faculty for 16 years.

Dr. Wang joined the faculty at MIT in 2001 as a professor in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. She chaired the Foreign Language and Literatures Section from 2005 to 2008. She was the author of several books including her most recent work The Other Digital China: Nontraditional Activism on the Social Web (Harvard University Press, 2019).