Background
Junting Huang is a scholar of Chinese/Sinophone literature, art, cinema and media culture, with additional interests in sound studies, new media studies and environmental media studies. His work examines the cultural politics of media technologies and their impact on the human sensorium — especially sound — in shaping spatial-political relations around borders, migration, diaspora and indigeneity. His scholarship has appeared in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, ASAP/Journal, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and edited volumes such as Sinoglossia and Inter-Asia Intermediality.
His first book project, The Noise Decade: Acoustic Entanglement across the Taiwan Strait, explores how artists in China and Taiwan have used sound recording to document, disrupt and reimagine post–Cold War social and political transformations. From urban soundscapes and labor protests to missile tests, these sonic interventions form an archive of noise that reflects the politics of intimacy and estrangement. He theorizes “noise” as a techno-sensorial force mediating cultural memory, political sensibility and historical loss.
More broadly, he works at the intersection of contemporary art, sound and archival practice. Previously, as assistant curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, he managed special collections including the Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art, the Yao Jui-Chung Archive of Contemporary Taiwanese Art and the Experimental Television Center Archive. His collaborations extend to sound artists and community organizations, with recent projects involving the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the Chester Gifted Program and Public Trust.
He has also received formal training in data science and integrates computational methods into his research on media preservation, cultural analysis, narrative studies and AI. He is particularly interested in how various traditions of literary criticism and critical theory have shaped cultural understandings of AI. His most recent work examines how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems simulate interpretive practices by retrieving, arranging and contextualizing textual evidence, and how large language models function as “language games” that ground social knowledge in communal practices of attention and acknowledgment.
He received his PhD in comparative literature from Cornell University. Before joining Binghamton, he was a College Fellow at Harvard University and held the ACLS Fellowship.
Select Publications
- “Five Red Apples and A RAG System,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies (forthcoming), first author, with Teddy Roland.
- “Large Language Games, Therapeutic or Otherwise,” PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association, vol.139, no. 3 (2024): 522-526.
- “Sonorous Geography: Mapping Background Noise in Music While We Work (2011),” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, vol. 17, no. 2 (2023): 171-188.
- “Phonographing Borders: Writing Acoustic Territories in Sinophone Sound Art,” ASAP/Journal, vol. 7, no.1 (2022): 19–42
- “Bordering Domesticity: Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong’s Contemporary Art,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 8, no. 1 (2021): 33-48.
Education
- PhD, MA, Cornell University
- MSt, University of Oxford
- BA, Tsinghua University
Research Interests
- Chinese/Sinophone Literary and Cultural Studies
- Chinese/Sinophone Art, Cinema, and Media
- Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Humanities
- Environmental Studies and Media Ecology
- Sound Studies and Auditory Culture
Teaching Interests
- Media Studies
- Critical Theory
- Contemporary World Cinema
- Comparative Literature, Film and Media
Awards
- ACLS Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies
- College Fellowship, Harvard University
- Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies
- Hu Shih Fellowship in Chinese Studies, Cornell University
- Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Scholarship in the Humanities, University of Oxford