About:

Nelson Jiajie Meng 孟嘉杰 is a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research broadly attends to intersectional marginalization in post-socialist China, engaging queer and crip theories to investigate precarities within these entanglements. His interests include and extend beyond literary and cultural texts to the materiality, labor, and infrastructures that underlie them. His research is also in ongoing conversation with — and critical of — both Sino-centric and US-centric framings, aiming to complicate the boundaries of Sinophone studies amid shifting geopolitical and economic geographies.

Academic History
Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2026-.
M.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies (en route), University of Kentucky, 2023-2026.
M.A. by Research in Chinese, Nanyang Technological University, 2020-2022.
B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2016-2020.