Runjie Wang

My research, broadly speaking, concerns the human-machine continuum — the technological, cultural, and political spaces where the boundaries between human and machine are dissolved — which is examined in the two projects I’m working on. My dissertation, situated within the context of 20th-century US racial capitalism and Chinese Marxism, is a comparative media historical study that asks how racial, ethnic, and national identities are reconfigured within these liminal spaces by interrogating the uneasy relationship between Chinese workers and robots. 

The other project is a historical study of machine vision and automation in the West Coast’s longshore industry and the Midwest's automobile industry in the 20th century, supported by the Gundlach Scholarship in Labor Studies and the Simpson Center’s Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship at UW.  An essay derived from this research, examining how the symbolic is relayed to the technical registers from industrial cinema and industrial vision technology, received third place in the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Student Writing Award in 2026. 

My previous writings on cinema and Chinese ethnicities include an essay on a Chinese state-sponsored ethnographic film anthology, which won another SCMS award (Nontheatrical Student Essay) in 2024 and is forthcoming in The Moving Image, and an essay on Tibetan cinema, published in Asian Cinema. 

At UW, I taught a class themed, “Cinema, Factory and Work,” which surveys imageries of work, workers, and robots across various film genres and in a global context. I also convened the "Mediating Experiences, Experiencing Mediation" Grad Conference, supported by the CMS department and "Media Conditioning" reading group, supported by the Simpson Center. 

There are three things I probably watch more than films. First, film review videos — I often consume movies secondhand through commentary. I published an essay on the phenomenon of the rampant film recap videos on the Chinese internet in relation to bricolage in Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. The second is airplanes. I sometimes go plane spotting at SEA and PAE in person, and binge-watch YouTube livestreams of those at other airports. Finally the slow-cinema-ish tableau of Puget Sound and the mountains of the Cascade Range.