Advancing environmental humanities, Xingming Wang joins APSI as postdoctoral associate

In November 2025, APSI welcomed our third postdoctoral associate, Dr. Xingming Wang. He joins an impressive cohort of talented scholars who held this position in prior years, including Professor Jieun Cho (now at CUHK) and Dr. Clara Park.

Wang is a literary scholar and cultural historian whose scholarship focuses on China, Sinophone studies, and environmental humanities. His research centers on cultures of fossil fuels in modern China, examining the cultural networks formed behind China’s journey to becoming the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal. Describing the scope of his work, Wang shared, “My research traces the historical trajectory through which coal becomes the ‘object of desire’ for Chinese intellectuals, revealing how they project their anxieties and aspirations onto this environmental object when navigating sociopolitical upheavals.”

His dissertation-based book project, currently titled “Coal Attachment: Cultures of Fossil Fuels in Modern China,” examines how modern Chinese literary and cinematic representations of coal shed light on the nation’s identity formation, political movements, and pursuit of modernity from the late Qing period to the post-socialist era. Wang’s research shows that the structures of feeling congealed around coal in China have evolved from developmentalist passion to environmental concern. Additionally, two papers on Chinese coal mining films derived from the third chapter of his dissertation are forthcoming in the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and the edited book East Asian Ecocinema.

At Duke, Wang is keen on encouraging students to consider some of the significant ecological challenges facing Asian societies, such as air pollution, waste management, natural disasters, and the risks associated with energy development. 

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Asked about his pedagogical approach, Wang observed, “My teaching aims to keep students informed of the world’s challenges and cultivate in them a sense of responsibility to confront these issues.” Through this lens, he aims to guide students in probing the political, economic, and aesthetic interests underlying literary and cinematic representations of nature.

In Spring 2026, Wang will teach a special topics course, “Cultures of Energy in Asia” (EAS 590), that draws on recent developments in the interdisciplinary field of energy humanities to explore the ways in which energy generated from various sources has been used to advance nationalist agendas and political movements in Asia. The course will also explore the links between energy, human bodies, and interpersonal relations to deepen students’ understanding of human-nature entanglements.

“I see public humanities as a venue where scholars learn from the needs of local communities and develop public-engaged scholarship.”

Wang is also an enthusiastic participant in public humanities projects and hopes to collaborate with interested faculty and students at Duke. From 2023 to 2025, he led a working group in Rutgers Global Asia Initiative to investigate the issues of Asian invasive species in New Jersey. This public-facing project aims to enrich cultural understanding of non-native species to counteract the xenophobic rhetoric that inflames hatred of ethnic minorities who are themselves sometimes deemed “invasive.” He is working with this group to design a website that introduces the cultural background of Asian invasive species.

This postdoctoral position at APSI is an ideal fit for Wang, who looks forward to working with several Duke faculty, including Carlos Rojas, Eileen Chow, Prasenjit Duara, Ralph Litzinger, and Rey Chow. In addition to developing his book manuscript with the support of Duke faculty, Wang is interested in exploring native-soil literature in the Sinophere, the Dongbei Renaissance, and intermedial features of contemporary Chinese novels. During his time at APSI, he expects to advance these interests and engage with issues arising from the new era of Sino-American relations.